Mock Sausage: Sage Lima Bean Rolls (1918)

The herbs do the sausage work

With no meat to lean on, the seasoning carries the name. Sage, thyme and sweet marjoram supply the sausage idea. The book asks for half a teaspoon of each, powdered. That means ground herbs, not crumbled leaves, and this version keeps the book's measure.

The same cookbook's sauce chapter says dishes built on beans, rice or "other foods having little flavor of their own" need special attention to seasoning, and this recipe is a clear case. The original leaves salt and pepper to the cook, so we've set amounts for one cup of dried beans.

Oil instead of lard

The frying fat is the other half of the recipe. A few pages earlier, in the meat chapter, the book prints a line in capitals: "LEARN TO USE THE VEGETABLE OILS." It names corn, cottonseed, peanut and olive oil for cooking and frying. The front pages also ask cooks to swap wartime substitutes for butter, sugar, animal fat and wheat where they can.

Mock Sausage follows that advice. Corn oil keeps animal fat out of the pan, just as the beans keep meat out of the rolls.

What the flour coat is for

Flour is the one wheat ingredient, and it's only a thin coat. It dries the surface of a soft mash so it's easier to handle. It also gives the hot oil something to brown. Since the inside is already cooked, the frying only has to build that crust. A shallow layer of oil does the job.

Its place in a Pittsburgh club's cookbook

The recipe is printed without a contributor's name on page 47 of the Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book (Pittsburgh, 1918). Sales went to the club's war work. Howard Heinz, the federal food administrator for Pennsylvania, wrote a foreword asking households to cut their use of wheat, meat, sugar and animal fats. The Food Administration leaned heavily on voluntary effort, though it also had powers to compel.

The meat chapter's other dishes are worth a look. A few pages earlier, Liberty Meat is fried slices of cornmeal mush with walnuts and peanut butter. Mock Duck is round steak rolled around stuffing. Not every mock dish in the book was meatless. Our article on wheatless and meatless cooking in 1918 follows the wider campaign.

A baked cousin from Massachusetts

Carolyn Putnam Webber's Two Hundred and Seventy-Five War-Time Recipes, printed in Bedford, Massachusetts, the same year, has Bean Sausages made from lima beans and sage. Hers adds bread crumbs and drippings and bakes in a greased pan. The Pittsburgh version skips the binder and the animal fat and finishes on the stove.

What we filled in

The original specifies a cup of dried beans and the herb measures. Soak and boil times, salt, pepper, flour, oil depth and roll size are our choices. Finger size here means about 1 1/2 tablespoons of mash. The overnight soak and the boil until very soft stay as the book wrote them.