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String Beans
If fresh beans are used pick them over, remove ends and "strings," and boil for 1/2 an hour or more; then drain them, and add 1 tablespoon Crisco and 2 tablespoons milk, season to taste, and serve after 10 minutes' slow cooking. If canned beans are used omit the first long boiling.
A plain vegetable side from the Crisco-sponsored era, when green beans were boiled far longer than anyone would tolerate now. The method is sound; the timing is not.
- Cut the boiling time hardHalf an hour or more leaves modern beans olive-drab and limp. Today's varieties are tender and stringless: 5 to 7 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until they bend but still snap, is enough. The later 10 minutes of slow cooking in fat and milk will soften them further, so stop the boil while they still have bite.
- "Strings"The quotation marks suggest the author already treated stringing as something not every bean needed. Stringless bush beans had been bred by this period but were not universal; almost nothing sold now needs stringing. Snap off the stem end and leave the tail if you like.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, and Crisco here is simply a neutral solid fat. A tablespoon of butter does the same job with better flavour; any neutral oil works if you want it dairy-free, though the milk stays.
- The milk finishTwo tablespoons of milk with the fat makes a very thin pan sauce that clings to the beans. Keep the heat low and do not cover tightly, or the milk will catch on the bottom or break.
- Canned beansDrain and rinse them, and give them well under 10 minutes -- they are already fully cooked and will collapse. Two or three minutes to heat through in the fat and milk is plenty. Frozen beans behave like fresh but need a minute or two less.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" here means little more than salt and pepper. Salt the boiling water as well as the finished pan; beans absorb very little seasoning once they leave the water.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity of beans; 1 tablespoon fat and 2 tablespoons milk would suit roughly 1 lb, serving about four as a side.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had put on the market in 1911. That explains why a tablespoon of shortening appears in a dish of green beans at all: the book's job was to put Crisco into every course, including vegetables that had traditionally been dressed with butter or salt pork. The long boil is not carelessness but usual practice of the period, when beans were coarser, stringier and often less fresh by the time they reached the pot, and when writers on cookery still tended to regard thoroughly softened vegetables as the more digestible kind. The casual mention of canned beans is worth noting too -- commercial canning had by this date made string beans a year-round item in many households, and a cookbook could assume its readers might have a tin in the cupboard.