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BACON AND BROAD BEANS (another way)
Throw some young beans, freshly shelled, into boiling water with a little salt. When the skin begins to shrivel drain them through a colander, and serve with parsley and butter. When the beans are old the outside skins will come off easily if boiled for half an hour. The bacon should be boiled separately (see BOILED BACON), and placed on the top of the beans. Time to boil the beans, fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. to 8d. per peck.
A plain English pairing that survives largely unchanged; the only real translation needed is the beans themselves, the cut of bacon, and the fact that "parsley and butter" here means a sauce rather than a garnish.
- Broad beans are fava beansSold fresh in the pod in late spring and early summer, and frozen year round. Frozen shelled beans work well and are already podded, which removes most of the labour.
- "Parsley and butter"A Victorian shorthand for melted butter sauce with chopped parsley stirred through — in Cassell's era usually butter thickened with a little flour and water or bean liquor, not just plain melted butter. A knob of butter, a spoonful of the cooking water and plenty of parsley gives the same effect.
- The stated boiling time is longSmall young beans of the sort sold now are done in three to five minutes; the cue in the recipe — skins beginning to shrivel — is more reliable than the clock.
- Skinning older beansThe half-hour boil for old beans is there only to loosen the tough grey outer skin. Modern practice is to blanch two or three minutes, cool, and slip the skins off, then cook the bright green kernels briefly. Boiling large beans a full half hour leaves them mealy.
- The baconThis means a British boiling joint — a piece of collar, hock or streaky cured in brine, simmered whole and sliced. American slab bacon or a smoked gammon joint is the nearest equivalent; strips of breakfast bacon are not. Soak a heavily cured piece an hour or two before simmering if it is salty.
- A peckA dry measure of two imperial gallons, about nine litres of unshelled pods. That is a garden-scale quantity; expect only a small fraction of the weight to be edible bean once shelled and skinned, so buy by shelled weight if you can.
- Cost and yieldCost -- Sixpence to eightpence a peck. The recipe gives no quantities and no number of servings; as a guide, allow around 1 lb of pods per person, or 4-5 oz of shelled beans, with 4-6 oz of cooked bacon each.
Broad beans are among the oldest cultivated pulses in Europe and were a staple of English gardens long before the runner bean or the pea took hold; until the eighteenth century "bean" in an English recipe generally meant this one. The pairing with bacon is practical rather than invented — both came to hand at the same moment in the household year, the beans from the garden in June and July, the bacon from a flitch cured after the pig-killing, and the salt of the meat balances the faintly bitter, starchy bean. Cassell's gives this as "another way" because the dictionary format collects variants side by side.