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BEANS FOR WINTER
String fresh green beans, and cut down the sides till within an inch of the end, boil in water fifteen minutes, take out and drain; when cold, pack in a stone jar, first putting two table-spoons of salt in the bottom, then a quart of beans, sprinkle with a table-spoon of salt, put in layer after layer in this way till the crock is full, pour over a pint (if not filled the first time, beans may be added until filled, putting in no more water after this pint) of cold well-water, put on a cloth with a plate and weight, set away in a cool place, and in about a week take off the cloth, wash it out in a little salt water (there will be a scum upon it), put back as before, and repeat operation at the end of another week; then pack away, and when wanted for use, take out the quantity wanted and soak for half an hour, put in pot in cold water with a piece of fresh pork, cook half an hour, season with pepper and a little salt if needed; or cook without pork, and season with butter and pepper.
This is a salt-cured crock of green beans, the vegetable-preserving method that most rural households used before reliable home canning. The instructions are clear and were written in good faith, but the salt concentration and storage conditions fall well outside what is now considered safe for a low-acid vegetable held under liquid.
- Why this one fails: the salt is far too weakWhy this one fails: the salt is probably too weak -- A tablespoon of salt per quart of packed beans, plus two tablespoons in the bottom and only a pint of plain water, works out to roughly 3 to 4 percent salt by weight, under the 5 percent or more generally held necessary to suppress Clostridium botulinum in a sealed, oxygen-poor crock. Traditional salt-bean methods that do work rely on much heavier salting, on the order of a pound of salt to ten pounds of vegetable. Sauerkraut takes a different route: light salting, about 2 percent, with protection coming from the acidity of the ferment.
- Low-acid vegetable, anaerobic conditionsGreen beans have a pH around 5.5 and do not acidify reliably on their own the way cabbage does. Weighted under water beneath a cloth and plate, they sit in exactly the low-oxygen, low-acid, low-salt environment in which botulinum toxin forms, and the toxin is odourless and invisible.
- The scum is a warning, not routine maintenanceThe scum -- The film the recipe tells you to rinse off weekly is surface yeast and mould. Films like this appear on sound ferments as well, but in a crock with little salt and no developed acidity there is nothing much holding spoilage organisms down, and surface moulds consume what acid there is.
- "A cool place" is not a temperatureA nineteenth-century cellar might have held 45-55F, or it might not. Nothing in the recipe measures or controls temperature, and the difference between a cold cellar and a modern basement is the difference between slow curing and active spoilage.
- Half an hour in the pot is not a safeguardHalf an hour in the pot is not a reliable safeguard -- The final cooking is a seasoning step, written for flavour and to draw out salt. Boiling does inactivate botulinum toxin, but nothing here controls or verifies temperature or timing, so this step cannot be relied on to make an improperly cured crock safe.
- If you want salt beansUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will specify salt by weight, brine strength and storage temperature. Do not scale up the salt in this one and hope.
- Notes on the original, for readingA stone jar is a glazed stoneware crock. "Fresh pork" means uncured pork, not bacon or salt pork, since the beans themselves bring plenty of salt to the pot.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s and 80s, when home canning in glass was still new and expensive, and families had long preserved the summer garden with salt, vinegar, sugar, smoke or a cold cellar. Salt-packed green beans of this kind were common across the Midwest and Appalachia under names like salt beans or, in a related dried form, leather britches, where the pods were strung on thread and hung to dry rather than crocked. The technique parallels sauerkraut: layer, salt, weight, let the liquid rise and skim the crock as it works. What separates the two is chemistry the writers had no way to measure. Cabbage ferments briskly to a protective acidity; green beans, less sugary and less acid to begin with, do not, and the modern understanding of botulism in low-acid home preserves dates from decades after this book was printed.