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Buttered String Beans
Remove the strings and cut beans diagonally in one-half inch pieces. Wash and cook in boiling water from one to three hours, adding salt the last half hour of cooking. Drain and reheat in White Sauce or dress with melted butter, pepper and more salt if needed. If canned beans are used (and they would be in some localities at this season of the year) turn them from the can into sauce-pan and reheat them in their own liquor. Drain and dress them with melted butter, salt, and pepper.
A plain vegetable side from a February menu, written when beans came either from a can or from a sack of tough field-grown pods. Only one instruction really needs revisiting.
- The cooking timeOne to three hours will reduce modern green beans to grey threads. Today's varieties are bred tender and want five to eight minutes in well-salted boiling water, until they bend without snapping. The long boil made sense for late-season, heavily fibrous pods, not for what is sold now.
- Stringing"Remove the strings" refers to the fibrous seam along the pod, largely absent from commercial beans today; stringless varieties were already on the market by the turn of the twentieth century and gradually displaced the tougher ones. Trim the stem end and move on; check a pod or two if you are using an heirloom or a very mature bean from a garden.
- Salt in the water, not at the endThe original adds salt only in the last half hour; no reason is given. Salt the water from the start instead — it seasons the beans throughout and does nothing to their texture in so short a boil.
- Keeping the colourIf the beans are to sit before serving, drain and spread them on a tray or drop them into ice water, then reheat in the butter or sauce. Held hot and wet, they turn olive within minutes.
- White SauceTreat it as a basic bechamel: roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt and pepper. (The book's own white sauce recipe is given elsewhere and is not reproduced on this page.)
- Canned beansReheating in their own liquor is still the right approach — it keeps them from going flabby — but drain well and dress generously, since canning dulls the flavour. A minute or two in the pan is enough; they are already fully cooked.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about 1 lb of beans for four people as a side dish, with 2 tablespoons of butter or a cup of white sauce to dress them.
The recipe's aside — "and they would be in some localities at this season of the year" — is the interesting part. 52 Sunday Dinners was arranged month by month, and in February a fresh green bean was hard to come by in much of the United States; the canned bean was the ordinary winter substitute, an unglamorous but genuine convenience of the industrial food supply then reaching into American kitchens. The instruction to boil fresh beans for up to three hours belongs to the habits of the period rather than to any regional quirk: cookery of the time generally treated green vegetables as things to be made soft. Beans could be served either in a white sauce or simply "buttered."