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String Beans
Break off the ends and string on either side of the bean, break into pieces an inch long, and boil them in soft water. If quite tender they will cook done in one hour; when tender, add salt to taste, and drain through a colander, and serve with butter.
A plain boiled-bean method from the era before crisp vegetables were fashionable. Two things in it are worth ignoring, and the rest still works.
- The hour is the thing to changeModern green beans, bred to be tender and picked young, are done in 5-8 minutes in boiling salted water. An hour reduces them to olive-drab mush; the instruction assumes tougher, more mature, string-heavy beans -- the recipe allows a full hour even for beans it calls "quite tender."
- StringingAlmost all supermarket beans are stringless varieties, so the second half of the instruction is obsolete. Snapping off the stem end is still worth doing; the tail end is edible.
- "Soft water"Water low in dissolved calcium and magnesium. Hard water was believed to toughen the skins and dull the color. Tap water is fine; a pinch of baking soda is sometimes suggested for very hard water, but it also turns beans slimy, so skip it.
- Salt at the start, not the endThe recipe adds salt only once the beans are tender; no reason is given. Salt the boiling water generously from the beginning instead; it seasons the beans throughout rather than just coating them.
- Draining and dressingDrain well and let the surface steam dry for a few seconds before adding butter, or the butter will slide off in a watery pool. About 2 tablespoons butter to a pound of beans.
- YieldA pound of beans trimmed and cut into inch lengths serves four as a side dish.
- If you want the colorBoiling uncovered lets volatile acids escape and keeps the green bright. The recipe does not say whether to cover the pot; a full hour's boiling will dull the color either way.
The instruction to remove "the string on either side" is the reason for the name: until breeding work in the late nineteenth century eliminated the fibrous seam -- a change generally traced to Calvin Keeney's stringless green pod of 1894 -- every green bean had to be strung by hand. Recipes like this one, with its flat hour of boiling and butter at the end, reflect a period when American cookbooks treated vegetables as something to be softened rather than tasted, and when produce commonly reached the cook days after picking. Green beans themselves are New World in origin, domesticated in the Americas and carried to Europe in the sixteenth century; the practice of eating the immature pod rather than shelling out the dried seed became widespread only as tender, low-fiber varieties were selected.