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Scalloped Kidney Beans
2 cups red kidney beans
¼ cup chopped onion
⅓ cup raw brown rice
1 tablespoon butter
2 cups tomatoes
1 tablespoon sugar
Salt to taste
1/8 teaspoon paprika
Canned beans may be used. Parboil the rice until done and flaky; drain. Arrange beans and rice in layers in baking dish; mix balance of ingredients and pour over the beans. Bake in a moderate oven about ½ hour.
A plain meatless casserole that assumes canned beans and canned tomatoes, both of which were pantry staples by the time this book appeared. A few of its instructions need translating.
- Moderate ovenSet it to 350F. The half hour is only there to heat everything through and let the tomato thicken, since nothing in the dish is raw except the onion.
- The beansTwo cups means cooked beans, not dry. About one and a half 15-oz cans, drained and rinsed, comes to roughly that. Dry beans would need soaking and an hour or more of simmering before they ever reached the baking dish.
- Parboil the rice until doneThe wording is contradictory but the intent is clear: the rice goes in fully cooked. Brown rice takes 35-45 minutes in plenty of salted water. Drain it well, or the casserole will be soupy.
- Two cups tomatoesCanned, with their juice, is most likely what is meant, though the recipe does not say so. One 15-oz can plus a little extra comes to about two cups; a 28-oz can will give more than the recipe calls for unless a good deal is drained off. Fresh tomatoes chopped and used with their juice work but give a thinner, sharper sauce.
- The onion is the weak pointRaw chopped onion poured over in tomato juice and baked half an hour may still be firm and sharp. Soften it first in the tablespoon of butter over medium heat for five minutes, then stir it into the tomato mixture.
- The sugarA tablespoon against two cups of tomatoes reads as a balance for acidity rather than for sweetness. Taste before adding all of it.
- Scalloped, but no crumbsHere the word simply means layered and baked in a dish. If you want the buttered crumb top the name usually implies, scatter a half cup of coarse dry breadcrumbs over the surface for the last ten minutes.
- YieldServes about four as a main dish, six as a side. A shallow two-quart baking dish suits it; in a deeper dish the center may need longer than thirty minutes.
Kidney beans baked with tomato belong to a whole family of meatless "luncheon dishes" that filled American cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, when meatless days, tight household budgets and a growing faith in the protein value of legumes all pushed in the same direction. Note the flat permission in the middle of the ingredient list: Canned beans may be used. Commercially canned beans and tomatoes were cheap and reliable by then, and shortcuts of this kind were printed rather than apologized for. The brown rice is the more unusual note; white rice was the default in most household cooking of the period, and brown rice appears more often in books with a health or reform leaning, where its unpolished grain was thought more nourishing.