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Bean Roast
1 cup well-roasted shelled
¼ cup milk peanuts
1 egg
2 cups well-seasoned mashed
1 teaspoon salt potatoes
⅛ teaspoon paprika
2 cups cooked Lima beans,
1 teaspoon onion-juice fresh or canned
Grind the peanuts, using the finest blade of the food-chopper. In a well-oiled baking-dish place a layer of potatoes, a layer of beans and a layer of peanuts. Continue making layers until all the ingredients are used. Blend milk with well-beaten egg and seasoning and pour over the top. Bake in a moderate oven (350° F.) until brown. Serve with brown sauce or tomato sauce.
A layered vegetarian loaf of the wartime-economy type, straightforward to make once the ingredient list is untangled from the book's two-column setting.
- Reading the ingredient listThe original prints ingredients in two columns that have run together. It reads: 1 cup well-roasted shelled peanuts, 2 cups well-seasoned mashed potatoes, 2 cups cooked Lima beans (fresh or canned), ¼ cup milk, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon paprika, 1 teaspoon onion juice.
- The hingeA quarter cup of milk and one egg is very little liquid for five cups of solids, and it will not soak through. Season the potatoes assertively and season the beans too, or the interior layers will taste flat under a browned top.
- Grinding the peanutsThe finest blade of a food chopper gives a dry, sandy meal, not peanut butter. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same job; run it too long and the peanuts turn to paste and the layers go greasy.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut: a halved onion pressed against a grater or reamer, or grated onion squeezed in a cloth. A teaspoon of finely grated onion works as well and adds no distracting texture.
- Lima beansDried limas cooked until tender, or frozen ones simmered until soft, both stand in for the canned. Drain them well; wet beans make the layers slump.
- Oven and timing350°F, as the book says, for roughly 40 to 50 minutes, until the top is set and has coloured. Deeper dishes need longer and brown less evenly.
- YieldAbout five cups of assembled mixture, serving four as a main dish with sauce, or six alongside other vegetables. It slices better after ten minutes' rest.
- The sauce is not optionalThe dish is dry by design, and the brown sauce or tomato sauce named at the end supplies most of its moisture. Have it made before the roast comes out.
Nut-and-legume roasts like this one belong to a distinct strand of early twentieth-century American cooking: the vegetarian main dish built to occupy the place of a joint of meat on the plate, layered or moulded, sliced at table, and served under a gravy. Peanuts did much of the work, being cheap, protein-rich and newly abundant as Southern acreage shifted toward them. The style is generally traced to the health-reform kitchens associated with Battle Creek, Michigan, whose nut foods and meat substitutes had spread into mainstream household manuals by the time this collection was compiled. Its appearance in a general-purpose homemaking book, rather than a specialist vegetarian one, shows how far such cooking had travelled, helped along by the meatless days of the First World War.