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To Boil Snaps with Bacon
Pick tender snaps, string carefully, put in water an hour or two, drain well and put in a pot with bacon which has been boiling. Boil gently until very tender.
A Southern method for green beans, in which the beans finish in the seasoned liquid left from simmering a piece of cured pork. The original assumes you already have bacon on the stove.
- "Snaps"Snap beans, that is, ordinary green beans picked young enough to break cleanly in half. Use about 1 1/2 to 2 lb for a family-sized pot.
- StringingNearly all modern varieties are bred stringless, so "string carefully" now means only topping and tailing and snapping into two-inch lengths. Older heirloom pole beans genuinely do need the seam pulled off.
- The soakThe hour or two in cold water would have helped freshen field-picked beans, and may also have served to float off insects; the recipe itself gives no reason. Supermarket beans need no more than a rinse; wilted farmstand beans do benefit from 30 minutes in cold water.
- The baconHere this almost certainly indicates a chunk of cured side meat or streaky salt pork rather than thin breakfast slices. Simmer 4 to 6 oz in about 4 cups of water for 45 minutes to an hour before the beans go in, so the fat and salt are in the liquid.
- SaltTaste the pork liquor before adding any. Cured pork today varies enormously in saltiness, and a salt-packed piece may need soaking or a change of water first.
- "Until very tender"This is the hinge, and it is deliberate. Southern-style beans cook 45 minutes to an hour and go olive-drab and silky; they are not meant to be crisp-tender. Stopping at 8 minutes gives a different dish entirely, not a better-executed version of this one.
- Heat level"Boil gently" means a bare simmer with the lid ajar. A hard rolling boil breaks the beans apart and reduces the liquor too fast; add hot water if the pot threatens to go dry.
- ServingServes four to six. Slice the pork and lay it over the beans, and serve the pot liquor with them, with cornbread to take it up.
"Snaps" is an old regional shortening of snap beans, the name often said to come from the sound of a fresh pod breaking, and the word survives in the American South long after "string beans" and "green beans" took over elsewhere. Cooking them at length with a piece of cured pork is the standard Southern treatment of almost any green vegetable, and it comes out of a household economy in which salt-cured side meat was the one seasoning always on hand: a single piece flavored the pot, and its cooking liquid, the pot liquor, was food in its own right rather than something to be poured off. Compilations like this one printed such directions in a few lines because the technique was assumed knowledge.