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French Beans, with Fine Herbs
Boil the beans as above; put two pats of fresh butter into a stewpan, with a tablespoonful of chopped and parboiled parsley, two shallots chopped fine, very little nutmeg, mignonette pepper, salt, and the juice of a lemon; simmer over a fire until melted, and then throw the beans in, toss the whole together, and dish them up with croutons round them.
A simple butter-and-herb toss for green beans, written in the shorthand of a period cookbook that assumes you have just read the boiling instructions on the line above.
- "Boil the beans as above"French beans here are ordinary green beans, topped, tailed and cut lengthwise or on the bias. Boil in well-salted water 3-5 minutes until just tender, then drain thoroughly " wet beans will not take up the butter.
- A pat of butter'Pat' is not a fixed measure; it is generally taken as somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce, so two pats is roughly 1 to 2 oz (30-55 g), or 2 to 4 tablespoons. The recipe names no quantity of beans, but that is enough for something like a pound to a pound and a half.
- Mignonette pepperCoarsely cracked pepper, usually white; the name is traditionally explained by a resemblance of the grains to mignonette seed. Crack whole peppercorns under a pan rather than using fine ground.
- Parboiled parsleyBlanching the chopped parsley briefly and squeezing it dry softens the raw grassiness and sets the colour. The recipe calls for it, and it is the reason the herb reads as a sauce ingredient rather than a garnish.
- The hinge: do not cook the beans in the lemonLemon juice -- The recipe puts the juice into the butter with the aromatics, before the beans go in. Acid held on hot green beans dulls bright green towards olive, so if you want the colour, add the juice at the end, off the heat, and serve promptly.
- "Simmer until melted"This means melt the butter gently with the aromatics over low heat, not reduce it. Butter taken past a bare simmer will separate and the shallots will brown, which is not wanted here.
- Nutmeg"Very little" is literal: two or three scrapes on a fine grater. It is there to round the butter, not to be tasted.
- CroutonsNot the salad cubes but small triangles or diamonds of bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged around the edge of the dish. Fry them before you start the beans.
- YieldNo quantities are given; on the butter quantity above it would serve about four as a side dish.
"Aux fines herbes" recipes like this came into English cookbooks through the French professional kitchen, and the vocabulary of this one " stewpan, mignonette pepper, croutons round the dish " is the vocabulary of a trained cook writing for a household that wanted its vegetables served in the French manner. Green beans eaten young, pod and all, were grown in Britain and America in the nineteenth century alongside beans raised to be shelled or dried; the slender kind was called French, though the origin of the name is uncertain. The instruction to ring the dish with fried bread belongs to a style of service in which a vegetable arriving alone at table was built into a presentation rather than simply spooned out.