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Bacon and Broad Beans
Put two pounds of good tender bacon into a pan with cold water, nearly full. When it has boiled over one hour add a quart of shelled broad beans, and boil till tender. Take off the skin from the bacon, sprinkle bread-crumbs over the top of it, and serve with the beans under, and fried parsley as a garnish round the dish. Smoked bacon should be dressed separately and placed on the beans when ready. Probable cost of bacon, 10d. to 1s. per pound. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian boiled bacon joint, not rashers. The whole thing hinges on understanding that "two pounds of good tender bacon" means a cured piece of pork shoulder or gammon to be simmered whole.
- What "bacon" means hereNot sliced breakfast bacon but a cured joint — the modern equivalent is a 2 lb piece of unsmoked gammon or bacon collar, sold as a boiling joint. Sliced bacon boiled for an hour would disintegrate.
- SaltinessNineteenth-century bacon was often heavily salted and could need soaking before cooking. Today's mildly cured joints do not need soaking, but taste the cooking water before you consider using any of it.
- Boil means simmerBring to the boil, then hold at a bare simmer. A rolling boil for an hour tightens the meat and makes it stringy. A common modern guide is about 25 minutes per pound plus 25 minutes, which for a 2 lb joint comes to about an hour and a quarter — near enough the recipe's hour before the beans go in, plus the time they take to soften.
- Broad beansThese are fava beans, shelled from the pod. A quart of shelled beans is about 1½ lb, which needs roughly 4 to 5 lb of beans in the pod. Frozen broad beans work and need only 4 to 6 minutes; adding them to the bacon pot for the last stretch, as written, will overcook anything but large late-season beans.
- Skinning and crumbingPeel the rind off while the joint is hot — it comes away cleanly then and not once cooled. The bread-crumbs meant dried "raspings" (oven-dried bread grated fine), pressed onto the fat. Browning the crumbed joint under a hot grill or in a 400F oven for a few minutes gives a better finish than crumbs alone.
- Fried parsleyVery dry parsley sprigs dropped into hot fat at about 350F for 15 to 20 seconds, then drained. Wet parsley will spit violently; shake it dry and pat it in a towel first.
- Smoked bacon cooked apartThe instruction to dress smoked bacon separately is sound. Smoke and salt leach into the water and will flavour the beans strongly, so cook it in its own pan if you want the beans clean-tasting.
- YieldFour to five as written, which by modern portions is closer to a generous three or four. The old prices — 10d. to 1s. a pound — are of no use except as a reminder that bacon was a costed household staple.
Bacon and broad beans is one of the oldest pairings in English cooking, common enough that it needed no introduction in a book like Cassell's. Broad beans were grown in Britain long before the runner and French beans arrived from the Americas, and a boiling joint of home-cured or grocer's bacon was the cheap keeping meat of the year, so the two came into season together in the household calendar as much as in the garden. The finish here — rind stripped, crumbs pressed on the fat, fried parsley round the dish — is the period's habit of making a plain boiled joint look like a presented course; the same crumbed treatment appears on cold ham and on boiled gammon throughout Victorian cookery books. Parsley sauce is the more familiar accompaniment today, though Cassell's here keeps the parsley as garnish only.