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String Beans
String, snap and wash two quarts beans, boil in plenty of water about fifteen minutes, drain off and put on again in about two quarts boiling water; boil an hour and a half, and add salt and pepper just before taking up, stirring in one and a half table-spoons butter rubbed into two table-spoons flour and half pint sweet cream. Or, boil a piece of salted pork one hour, then add beans and boil an hour and a half. For shelled beans boil half an hour in water enough to cover, and dress as above.
A plain nineteenth-century treatment of green beans, finished either with a butter-and-cream sauce or with salt pork. The measurements translate easily; the cooking times do not.
- The hinge: cooking timeAn hour and a half of boiling will reduce modern beans to olive-drab threads. Today's varieties, bred stringless and tender, want 4-8 minutes in boiling salted water. The long boil made sense for the coarse, fibrous, fully strung beans of the 1870s, picked larger than we pick them now.
- Two quarts of beansMeasured whole and snapped, that is roughly 2 lb, serving six to eight. The recipe gives no yield.
- "String, snap"Stringing means pulling the fibrous seam from each pod, a step almost entirely obsolete since stringless cultivars became standard. Check the seam on heirloom or overgrown beans; otherwise just top and tail.
- The change of waterBoiling fifteen minutes, draining, and starting again in fresh water was likely meant to soften the strong flavor of older beans, though the recipe does not say why. Discarding the first water also costs vitamin C and some color. There is little reason to do it with beans from a market today.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream also used in farm kitchens. Half a pint is one cup; heavy or whipping cream is the closest match.
- The butter-and-flour finishOne and a half tablespoons butter rubbed into two tablespoons flour is a beurre manie, stirred in raw to thicken the cream. Let it come to a simmer for a minute or two after it goes in or the sauce will taste of raw flour.
- The salt pork versionA "piece" is unspecified; 4-6 oz for 2 lb of beans is a reasonable reading. Simmer it first to render fat and flavor the water, and hold back on salt at the end, since the pork supplies plenty.
- "Shelled beans"Fresh shell beans, meaning pods too mature to eat whole, shucked for the seeds inside: cranberry, lima, or field beans caught green. Half an hour is a fair estimate for these, though it depends on the bean.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping came out of Marysville, Ohio in 1877, compiled from contributions by many women rather than written by one author. String beans were a summer glut crop, eaten fresh for a few weeks and then dried -- known in some regions as "leather britches" -- or salted down in crocks for winter. The recipe offers two finishes, one from the dairy and one from the pork barrel. The very long boiling times found throughout this book may be less carelessness than a record of the vegetables themselves; stringless varieties appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and spread gradually thereafter.