Home › Vegetarian Dishes › Boston Roast
Boston Roast
1 1/2 cups dry kidney beans 3 tablespoons salt 1 to 2 cups grated cheese 2 tablespoons chopped onion 1 cup bread-crums 1/2 cup milk Soak beans twenty-four hours. Cook until soft in water in which the salt has been dissolved. Drain, chop, add onion, cheese, crums, more salt if needed, and enough milk to moisten. Form into a loaf. Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F.) for forty minutes. Baste occasionally with hot water and fat.
A bean-and-cheese loaf of the sort that filled the meatless slot in 1920s household cooking. It works, but two of the quantities need thought before you start.
- The saltThree tablespoons is intended for the pot of cooking water, not the loaf, and even so it is a heavy hand by current taste. A tablespoon in the bean water is plenty, and the later direction to add "more salt if needed" should be judged after the cheese goes in.
- Soaking and cookingTwenty-four hours is longer than needed; eight to twelve hours in cold water is standard now, or an hour in boiling water off the heat. Salt in the soaking or cooking water does not prevent the beans softening, contrary to old kitchen lore, so the recipe's method is sound. Expect 60 to 90 minutes of simmering until fully tender.
- YieldA cup and a half of dry kidney beans gives roughly four cups cooked, which with the cheese and crumbs makes a loaf serving five or six.
- Chopping"Chop" here means a coarse mash, not a puree. Leave some beans recognisable or the loaf turns pasty; a potato masher or a few pulses in a processor is right.
- The cheeseGrated cheese in this period would most often have been a firm Cheddar or a dry American cheese, though the recipe does not specify. One cup binds; two makes a richer, softer loaf that needs less milk.
- Crumbs and milkBread-crumbs here were most likely crumbs from stale bread rather than the fine dried commercial kind, which absorb far more liquid. If using dried crumbs, add the milk cautiously - the mixture should just hold a shape, not slump.
- Oven and panThe 350F given is accurate for a moderate oven. The loaf can be free-formed on a greased shallow pan as intended, which is what makes the basting possible; a loaf tin gives a moister, paler result and needs no basting.
- BastingHot water and fat brushed on two or three times keeps the exposed crust from drying and hardening. Melted butter or a neutral oil does the job. Let the loaf rest ten minutes before slicing or it will crumble.
Bean loaves like this one belong to the wave of American vegetarian cookery that came out of health reform circles in the late nineteenth century and reached mainstream magazines by the 1920s. The name presumably nods to Boston's long association with cooked beans - Boston brown bread and Boston baked beans were already national shorthand - and "roast" is doing the work of reassurance, promising a carvable centrepiece where no meat exists. Loaves of this kind, bound with cheese, eggs, nuts or crumbs, were one answer to a meatless dinner in a period before commercial meat substitutes, and they appear in household cookbooks under names like nut roast and savoury loaf. The reliance on dry beans and grated cheese also made it cheap protein.