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Bean Cutlets
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 tablespoonful flour ½ cupful bean liquor Salt and pepper to taste 2 eggs ¼ lb. dried beans Soak beans in water twenty-four hours, then boil for several hours till quite tender, drain them, preserving liquor, chop them A few cooked mixed vegetables
A late-Victorian style bean croquette, bound with a thick Crisco roux and egg rather than potato or breadcrumb. The ingredient list and method have run together in this printing, so read it as: a roux of Crisco and flour let down with bean liquor, stirred into chopped cooked beans with a few cooked vegetables and egg, chilled, shaped and fried.
- The bean quantity"14 lb. dried beans" is almost certainly a quarter pound, roughly 115 g, which cooks up to about 1½ cups and matches the small amount of sauce and two eggs. Fourteen pounds would be absurd against 2 tablespoons of fat.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, launched in 1911 and the whole point of this book. Modern Crisco is reformulated to remove trans fats; any solid vegetable shortening, or plain butter, works for the roux, and a neutral oil is fine for the frying.
- Bean liquorThe cooking water, saved after draining. It carries starch and thickens more firmly than plain water, which is what holds the cutlet together. If you have thrown it out, unsalted stock is the nearest substitute.
- The soak and boilTwenty-four hours is longer than needed for modern dried beans; eight to twelve is enough, and "several hours" of boiling can usually be an hour to ninety minutes for haricots or navy beans. Cook until they crush easily between finger and thumb, or the cutlets will be gritty.
- The hinge: a stiff panadeCook the flour in the Crisco for a minute, add the bean liquor and simmer until it is genuinely thick, pulling away from the pan. A slack binder gives a mixture that spreads in the pan; a stiff one lets the cutlets hold their shape.
- Chill before shapingThe original does not say so, but the mixture needs an hour in the refrigerator once the egg is beaten in. Cold mixture shapes cleanly into flat oval cutlets and absorbs less fat.
- FryingShallow-fry in about a quarter inch of hot fat, three to four minutes a side, until a firm brown crust forms. A coating of breadcrumbs is not mentioned here, though many cutlets and rissoles of this period were crumbed before frying.
- YieldFour to six small cutlets, serving two or three; a tomato sauce or a plain brown gravy suits them.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it. Crisco was marketed as a purely vegetable fat, free of the objections some readers held against lard, and as keeping well without refrigeration. The bean cutlet itself is older than the book. Meatless "cutlets" and "rissoles" built from pulses, lentils or nuts, shaped into chop or patty form and served with gravy, appear in British and American vegetarian cookery from the later nineteenth century, much of it connected with health-reform circles. The butcher's name for a meatless dish was part of the appeal.