Bean Salad
String young beans, break into half-inch pieces (or leave whole), wash and cook soft in salt water; drain well, add finely-chopped onions, pepper, salt and vinegar; when cool add olive-oil or melted butter. The onions may be omitted.
A plain nineteenth-century green bean salad, dressed warm so the beans absorb the vinegar. The instructions are complete; only the cooking time and proportions need translating.
- "Cook soft" is the one thing to reconsiderBoiled until genuinely soft, young beans lose their color and turn limp. Six to eight minutes in well-salted water leaves them tender with some bite; longer if you want the older, softer texture the book assumes.
- Stringing"String young beans" refers to varieties with a fibrous seam along the pod, largely bred out of modern green beans. Snap off the stem ends and skip the stringing unless you are using an heirloom or runner bean.
- Dress them warmAdding vinegar, salt and pepper to hot drained beans lets them take up the seasoning; the oil or butter goes in only once cool, so it coats rather than soaks. Do not reverse the order.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives none. For 1 lb of beans, start with 3 tablespoons vinegar, 4 to 5 tablespoons olive oil, half a small onion finely chopped, and salt to taste. Cider vinegar was commonly made and kept in American households of the period and is a reasonable choice here.
- Melted butter as dressingOlive oil was an imported grocery item that many Midwestern households did not stock, which may be why butter is offered as an alternative. Butter congeals as the salad chills, so if you use it, serve the salad at room temperature rather than cold.
- Draining"Drain well" matters more than usual here, since water clinging to the beans dilutes the vinegar. Spread them on a towel for a minute before dressing.
- Yield1 lb of beans makes four modest side servings. The salad keeps a day or two refrigerated and improves in the onion-and-vinegar version.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) came out of Marysville, Ohio. Bean salads of this kind — beans boiled, then steeped in vinegar and oil with onion — are generally traced to German and Central European practice, and Ohio's large German-speaking population makes their appearance in a Buckeye State book unsurprising; the dish is close kin to the Bohnensalat still served in Bavaria and Austria. The offer of melted butter in place of olive oil is suggestive of the period: olive oil was an imported grocery item many households did not stock, while butter was always at hand.