Break string-beans into pieces and let boil in salted water until tender; then heat 1 tablespoonful of butter; stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour until brown. Add the water in which the beans were cooked, ½ cup of vinegar, 1 tablespoonful of brown sugar, some cinnamon and cloves to taste. Let sauce boil. Add the beans and simmer ten minutes. Serve hot with a beef pot roast.
A sweet-sour brown sauce built on the bean cooking water — closer to a German süß-sauer vegetable than to anything served plain. The original gives no bean quantity, so scale the sauce to what you have.
- QuantityThe sauce as written (1 tablespoon each butter and flour, ½ cup vinegar) is proportioned for roughly 1 to 1½ lb of string beans, serving four. Nothing in the text specifies this; it is inferred from the roux size.
- Save the cooking waterThis is the hinge. The bean liquid is the only stock in the dish, so do not drain it away — reserve about 1 cup and salt the boiling water properly, since that seasoning carries into the sauce.
- Brown the flour, but watch it"Stir in flour until brown" means a light brown roux, two to three minutes over medium heat. Past that it loses thickening power and the sauce will be thin.
- The vinegar is assertiveHalf a cup of vinegar against one tablespoon of sugar reads very sharp to modern palates. Start with less, taste after the sauce boils, and add more.
- Spices"Some cinnamon and cloves to taste" wants restraint: a pinch of ground cinnamon and two or three whole cloves, fished out before serving. Ground cloves overwhelm the dish almost immediately.
- Bean textureBeans boiled until tender and then simmered a further ten minutes will be soft and olive-drab. Boil them to just-tender — 5 to 7 minutes for slim beans — if you want them to hold their shape, or accept the older style, which is fully yielding by design.
- ServingMeant as a hot side for beef pot roast, where the sour-sweet sauce cuts the fat. It also suits boiled brisket or roast pork, and the sauce can be thinned with a little of the roasting juices.
Sweet-sour vegetables in a browned-flour sauce are a fixture across the old Polish, German and Ashkenazi kitchens of Central Europe: a roux (a fat-and-flour roux) sharpened with vinegar and softened with sugar turns up on beans, red cabbage, beets and cucumbers alike, and cinnamon and cloves in a savory sauce point to the same tradition that produced sweet-sour braised meats. Books of this kind — a dish a day, each tagged with a country — sold the idea that a home cook could tour Europe from her own stove. Whether Polish cooks would have recognized this particular version as theirs is another question: such labels may tell you as much about American appetites for the exotic as about Warsaw or Kraków.