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Vegetable Luncheon
1 pound kidney beans
2 cups cooked tomatoes, fresh
1 cup diced carrot or canned
I green pepper
½ cup rice
1 large onion
1½ 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 sautéd green peppers and mushrooms.
Serve with some milk, egg or cheese dish.
A meatless bean-and-vegetable stew from the era when "vegetarian" still allowed a ham bone. The quantities are generous and the bean cooking time reflects older, drier beans.
- Boil the kidney beans hard firstRaw and undercooked red kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin, which causes violent gastric upset. After soaking and draining, bring them to a full rolling boil for at least ten minutes before dropping to a simmer. The recipe's "boiling water slowly" is ambiguous on this point; do not slow-cook them at a bare simmer from cold.
- Four hours is too longFour hours is longer than modern beans need -- beans from a supermarket, soaked overnight, are usually tender in 60 to 90 minutes. Older, drier stock could need considerably longer. Start testing at the hour mark.
- The ham boneOffered as an option in a dish otherwise built entirely from vegetables, a reminder that 'meatless' was loosely applied in this period. Leave it out for a genuinely meatless dish; a spoon of smoked paprika or a dried mushroom in the bean pot gives some of the same depth.
- QuantitiesOne pound of dried kidney beans is about 2½ cups dry and yields roughly 6 cups cooked. Half a cup of rice is raw measure. Eighteen large mushrooms is around 12 oz. The whole thing serves six to eight.
- Salt the beansThe original salts only the rice water. Season the beans during the last half hour of cooking and again after the vegetables go in, or the finished dish tastes flat.
- Don't overcook the vegetables"Simmer until tender" after the beans are already done means 15 to 20 minutes for the carrot and onion. Add the tomatoes with them; they need no longer.
- The garnishSauté the peppers and mushrooms separately in butter or oil over fairly high heat so they brown rather than steam, and spoon them over at the table. Stirred in, they disappear into the stew.
- Saving the rice waterSound thrift, and the starchy liquid does body a gravy. Use it the same day or refrigerate it; starch water sours quickly at room temperature.
Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household compendiums aimed at the middle-class home manager, and vegetarian recipes in such a book reflect the nutritional thinking of the first decades of the twentieth century as much as any ethical vegetarianism. Domestic science of the period had absorbed the idea that beans, milk, eggs and cheese supplied the same "proteid" as meat at a fraction of the cost, which is exactly why the recipe ends by instructing the cook to serve it alongside a milk, egg or cheese dish rather than leaving it to stand alone. The casual suggestion of a ham bone shows how far the term stretched: meatless in this context often meant economical, a way of stretching the household budget or observing a meatless day, not necessarily abstaining on principle.