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Baked-Bean Salad
Drain the liquid from baked beans, season more highly, and add a little chopped cucumber pickle.
Serve in a bed of lettuce-leaves, dressing with mayonnaise. This salad may be the principal dish for a winter luncheon, as it has much food value.
A Good Way to Warm Over Baked Beans Put into a hot frying-pan some of the pork cooked with the beans. When the fat has melted and is hot, pour in the beans, cover, and set pan back on stove where beans will cook slowly and brown underneath. Fold over like an omelet, turn out on a hot platter and serve with savory tomato sauce (see page 71), or tomato catsup. Garnish dish with parsley.
Two uses for the tail end of a pot of baked beans: a cold salad and a skillet cake. Neither needs much translation, but a few details assume a coal range and a bean pot.
- Drain, then dryBaked beans carry more clinging liquid than the recipe admits. After draining, spread the beans on a plate or in a sieve for a few minutes so the mayonnaise does not slacken into a puddle on the lettuce.
- "Season more highly"Cold food reads flat, and canned or home-baked beans are already sweet. Salt, black pepper, a spoonful of the pickle brine and a little mustard bring it back into balance.
- Cucumber pickleThis means chopped sweet or sour cucumber pickle, not relish. Bread-and-butter slices work; dill gives a sharper salad, which suits the sweetness better.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of drained beans dresses with 1/3 cup mayonnaise and serves two as the luncheon dish the book intends, or four as a side.
- The salt porkThe scrap of pork baked on top of the beans is the fat for the second dish. If your beans were made without it, or came from a can, start with a tablespoon of bacon fat or oil instead.
- Browning the bean cake"Set pan back on stove" means the cooler part of a wood or coal range. Use medium-low heat, covered, for 10 to 15 minutes until a crust forms on the bottom; a lid keeps the top soft enough to fold.
- Folding itLoosen the edges with a thin spatula before you try. A cast-iron or well-seasoned pan of 8 to 10 inches gives a cake thick enough to fold without collapsing.
- SauceThe tomato sauce referred to on page 71 is not reproduced here; assume a plain thickened tomato sauce of the period. Ketchup, as offered, is the honest substitute, and a spoonful of the bean liquid stirred into either loosens it nicely.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to leftovers were a small industry in the United States between the 1890s and the First World War, when domestic-science writers treated waste in the kitchen as a moral and economic failing rather than a mere inconvenience. Baked beans were an obvious target: a New England bean pot was cooked in quantity because it took most of a day in a slow oven, so a surplus was often the result, and Saturday-night beans could be expected to leave Sunday and Monday material. The salad here belongs to the same moment as the great vogue for mayonnaise on a lettuce leaf, when almost anything cold could be called a salad if it arrived dressed and garnished. The author's note that it "has much food value" is the language of the new nutrition science, which had begun measuring foods in calories and protein and gave writers a respectable argument for serving beans at a ladies' luncheon.