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Vegetable Luncheon
1 pound kidney beans 1 cup diced carrot 1 green pepper 1 large onion 2 cups cooked tomatoes, fresh or canned 1/2 cup rice 1/2 dozen large mushrooms Soak the beans in cold water overnight. Drain and cook in boiling water slowly for about four hours. A ham-bone or a piece of bacon cooked with them adds to the flavor. Drain, and add chopped carrots, pepper, thinly sliced onion and tomatoes. Simmer until tender. Boil rice separately in salted water, drain and add to the vegetables. (The rice water should be saved to use in soups or gravies.) Garnish with sauted green peppers and mushrooms. Serve with some milk, egg or cheese dish.
A one-pot bean and vegetable stew from the era when "vegetarian" meant meatless in principle and a ham bone was still allowed in as seasoning. The quantities make a great deal of food.
- Cooking time on the beansFour hours is far longer than needed today; older, drier stock and less controllable heat may account for some of it. Kidney beans soaked overnight are usually tender in 60 to 90 minutes at a steady simmer. Test rather than time.
- Boil, don't coddle, the beansDried kidney beans contain a lectin that is destroyed only by real heat. Bring them to a full rolling boil for at least ten minutes at the start rather than letting them sit at a bare simmer, and discard the soaking water as directed.
- 1 pound of dried beansThat is roughly 2 1/2 cups dry, yielding 6 to 7 cups cooked. With the rice and vegetables the pot serves 8 generously; halve everything for a family meal.
- The ham boneOptional in the original and obviously not vegetarian. A smoked ham hock, a rind of bacon, or for a meatless version a piece of parmesan rind or a spoonful of smoked paprika added with the vegetables.
- Add salt lateNothing in the recipe salts the beans. Season once they are tender; the tomatoes going in early will also slow softening, so get the beans most of the way there before they meet the acid.
- "Sauted" peppers and mushroomsSauteed. Cook them in butter or oil over fairly high heat until browned at the edges and add them at the table, not in the pot, so they keep their texture.
- The rice waterBoiling rice in a large volume of salted water and draining it is the older method; the starchy water was thriftily kept for thickening soups. It keeps a day or two refrigerated.
- ServingThe instruction to serve with "some milk, egg or cheese dish" reads as a suggestion for rounding out the meal rather than a garnish; nutritional writing of the period did encourage adding milk, egg or cheese to bean-and-cereal dishes. Cheese grated over the bowl does much the same work.
Household cookbooks and magazine food pages of the nineteen-twenties and thirties often carried short meatless sections, and the reasons usually given at the time were economy and the newer science of nutrition, which held that beans, rice and dairy together could stand in for a meat course at lower cost. The Delineator was a Butterick magazine, chiefly fashion, with a household and food department; recipes of this kind appear to have been aimed at cooks stretching a budget as much as at committed vegetarians, which may be why a ham bone can be suggested in the same breath. The dish belongs to the broad family of bean-and-rice stews found wherever both crops are cheap, dressed here with a green pepper and mushroom garnish to make it presentable as a luncheon centerpiece.