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Stringless Beans with Bacon
Cut three thin slices of bacon in shreds crosswise, try out in a frying pan. Cook until tender two cups green, stringless beans and three or four small new onions, in boiling salted water. Drain and add to bacon, mix well, add salt (if necessary) and pepper; turn into a hot serving dish.
A straightforward May vegetable dish that needs only a few notes on wording and timing.
- "Try out"An old rendering term: cook the bacon slowly over medium-low heat until the fat runs and the shreds crisp. Keep the fat in the pan — it is the dressing for the beans.
- Stringless beansThe word distinguished the newer stringless snap-bean varieties from older sorts that had to be topped, tailed and de-strung. Any modern green bean qualifies; just trim the stem ends.
- Cooking the beansBoil in well-salted water 4-6 minutes for slim beans, up to 8 for thicker ones — they should be tender but still green. Period recipes often cooked beans considerably longer; there is no need for it here.
- New onionsThese are spring onions pulled young with small round bulbs, not dry storage onions. Scallions with fat white ends are the closest supermarket equivalent; halve any that are larger than a marble and give them a minute's head start on the beans.
- SaltThe parenthetical "if necessary" matters — between the salted cooking water and the bacon, the dish is usually seasoned already. Taste before adding more.
- YieldTwo cups of beans and three slices of bacon make a side dish for two, stretching at most to four. Double freely; use a wide pan so the beans coat rather than steam.
- ServingWarm the dish, as instructed. Bacon fat congeals quickly on cold china and the beans lose their gloss.
Green beans with bacon fat is a thrift technique more than a formal recipe: the drippings from a few slices season a whole vegetable dish and nothing is wasted. Snap beans and young onions are early-summer garden produce, and menu books of the period were often organised week by week, which would have had the effect of pointing cooks toward what the market actually held. The insistence on "stringless" beans is telling: nineteenth-century American seedsmen worked hard at breeding snap beans without the tough fibre along the pod seam, and the trait was evidently new enough to be worth naming in a recipe title.