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String Bean Salad
Marinate cold, cooked, stringless beans with French Dressing. There should be enough beans to make a generous border around a cold veal loaf. Sprinkle beans thickly with small onions thinly sliced and the rings separated. Garnish edge of dish with sprays of parsley and Nasturtium blossoms. The finely chopped seed-cells may also be sprinkled over beans and is quite an addition.
A composed salad meant to ring a platter of cold veal loaf, so it is built for looks as much as flavour. Two things decide whether it works: how the beans are cooked and how long they sit in the dressing.
- Cook and shock the beansBoil in well-salted water until just tender, 4-6 minutes for slender beans, then plunge into ice water and drain dry. Beans left to cool in their own heat turn olive-drab and limp, which ruins a dish whose whole point is the green border.
- "Stringless" beansThe term pointed to beans bred without the fibrous seam along the pod, a type that had entered the seed trade in the 1890s. Any modern green bean qualifies; older or fatter pods may still need the stem tip snapped and the string pulled.
- French DressingIn American books of this period this means a simple vinaigrette shaken to combine, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today.
- Marinating timeThirty minutes to an hour in the dressing is enough. Left overnight the acid dulls the colour and softens the beans past the crispness the salad depends on.
- The onionsSlice on a mandoline or with a very sharp knife so the rings separate cleanly, and soak them in cold water for ten minutes before scattering to take off the raw bite.
- Nasturtium blossoms and seed cellsBoth flower and green seed pod are edible and peppery; the pods taste close to capers. Use only untreated blossoms from your own garden or a grower selling them as food, never florist or nursery plants.
- Assembly and yieldDress the beans, then arrange them at the last moment so the platter does not pool with oil. About a pound of beans makes a generous border for a loaf serving six to eight.
This comes from Elizabeth O. Hiller's 52 Sunday Dinners, a book organised as a year of complete Sunday menus, which explains why the entry reads as a component rather than a standalone dish: it exists to encircle the cold veal loaf served alongside it. Cold composed salads arranged as borders and garnishes were common on the era's table, where a Sunday roast or loaf was expected to reappear cold and dressed up rather than merely reheated. The nasturtium is the period detail worth noticing. Grown widely in American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century for both its blossoms and its green seed pods, which were commonly pickled as a domestic substitute for imported capers, it gave a cook colour and a peppery bite from the back yard. Beans sold as stringless were the result of late nineteenth-century seed-trade breeding.