Bean Pickles
Pick green beans of the best variety, when young and tender, string, and place in a kettle to boil, with salt to taste, until they can be pierced with a fork, drain well through a colander, put in a stone jar, sprinkle with cayenne pepper, and cover with strong cider vinegar; sugar may be added if desired.
A fresh-pack vinegar pickle rather than a fermented or canned one, so it comes together in an afternoon. Two things need translating: what "strong cider vinegar" meant, and how long to cook the beans.
- The hinge: don't cook them to the fork stageBoiling until a fork slides through leaves beans that collapse once vinegar goes over them. Five to seven minutes in salted water, until just tender and still squeaky, gives a pickle with some snap a week later.
- "Strong cider vinegar"Cider vinegar of the period varied in strength, and "strong" most likely meant full-strength rather than watered down. Use commercial cider vinegar undiluted, and do not cut it with water; the vinegar is the only thing preserving these beans.
- StringingOlder bush and pole varieties had a tough fibrous seam that had to be pulled off. Modern stringless beans need only their stem ends trimmed.
- The stone jarA glazed stoneware crock. A wide-mouth glass jar does the same job and lets you see mould forming. Avoid anything metal other than stainless steel, and keep the beans fully submerged with a small saucer or a folded round of parchment.
- Quantities to fill inThe original gives none. For 2 lb of trimmed beans figure roughly 3 cups of vinegar, 1 tablespoon salt in the blanching water, 1/2 to 1 teaspoon cayenne, and 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar if you want the sweeter version.
- StorageThese are refrigerator pickles, not shelf-stable ones. There is no processing step here, so cool them and keep them cold; they will be well flavoured after three or four days and are best inside a month. Discard the jar if the brine turns cloudy or ropy or anything grows on top.
- Yield2 lb of beans fills roughly two quart jars and serves as a relish for eight to ten meals alongside cold meat.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Ohio in the late 1870s, assembled from contributions by Methodist housewives, and its pickle chapter reflects a kitchen where vinegar was the workhorse preservative. Reliable home canning of low-acid vegetables was still decades away from being understood, so green beans, which spoil quickly and cannot safely be simply sealed in water, were instead boiled, drained and drowned in acid. The instruction to "string" the beans reflects the ordinary labor of the period: commercial stringless varieties, generally traced to Calvin Keeney's breeding work, were not introduced until the 1890s, and stringing remained routine in kitchens long after they existed, so the seam had to be pulled from every pod by hand. Cayenne rather than the dill, mustard seed or clove of many contemporary pickles gives this one an unusually plain, hot profile, and the offhand "sugar may be added if desired" is typical of the book's habit of leaving the final seasoning to the cook's household.