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Butter Beans
With a knife cut off the ends of pods and strings from both sides, being very careful to remove every shred; cut every bean lengthwise, in two or three strips, and leave them for half an hour in cold water. Much more than cover them with boiling water; boil till perfectly tender. It is well to allow three hours for boiling. Drain well, return to kettle, and add a dressing of half a gill cream, one and a half ounces butter, one even tea-spoon salt, and half & tea-spoon. pepper. This is sufficient for a quart of cooked beans..
A dressed green bean dish from an era when pods were tougher, stringier and cooked far longer than anything sold today. The conversions are simple; the timing is the part to ignore.
- What "butter beans" means hereNot shelled limas. The instruction to string the pods and slice them lengthwise points to a flat, broad-podded snap bean — the type sold now as Romano or Italian flat bean. Most modern varieties are bred stringless, so the careful shred-removal is usually no longer needed.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. Use heavy or whipping cream; cream skimmed from unhomogenised milk was often richer than today's half-and-half, though its fat content varied a good deal.
- One and a half ounces butterThree tablespoons. Together with the cream it makes a loose pan dressing rather than a sauce, so keep the beans well drained or it will thin out.
- The three hoursThis is the one direction to disregard outright. Contemporary flat beans are tender in 6 to 10 minutes in boiling water, or a little longer if the pods are very broad. Three hours produces olive-drab mush with no structure and none of the flavor left in the pod.
- "Much more than cover them"Sound advice for a different reason than the author intended: a large volume of hard-boiling salted water returns to the boil quickly and keeps the pods bright. Salt the water generously even though the recipe salts only at the end.
- The cold-water soakThe recipe gives no reason for the half hour in cold water; a soak of this kind will freshen limp market beans. With fresh beans it is optional; with beans that have been in the refrigerator a few days it genuinely firms them up.
- FinishingReturn the drained beans to the dry hot pan, add butter, cream, salt and pepper, and toss over low heat only until the dressing coats them. Boiling it down will break the cream.
- YieldA quart of cooked beans is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb raw, and serves four to six as a side dish.
Buckeye Cookery (first published in 1876 as The Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, and reissued in revised form in 1877 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) reflects a moment when American vegetable cookery was still governed by the toughness of what came out of the garden. Snap beans of the period had fibrous strings running down both seams and a parchment layer inside the pod, and the long boil in this recipe — typical of its own day — was a real response to a real vegetable. The stringless bean is generally credited to Calvin Keeney's breeding work in New York in the late nineteenth century, after which recipes like this one gradually shed both the stringing and the marathon boiling. The name "butter bean" has always been slippery in American usage: in the South it usually means a shelled lima, while here it appears to refer to a broad flat-podded snap bean valued for its soft texture when dressed with cream and butter.