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Beans, Broad or Windsor, to Stew
Have ready a good rich brown gravy. Cut up some small onions, chives, and parsley; throw them into the gravy and simmer for ten minutes before the beans are put in. Sprinkle a quart of beans with two tea-spoonfuls of salt, one of pepper, and one of sugar, mix together and put them into the gravy. Stir the beans gently over a slow fire till the gravy is absorbed by them. In ten minutes serve them up. Probable cost, 6d. a peck. Sufficient for a dish.
A Victorian side dish that assumes the cook already has stock-pot gravy on hand and beans that have been shelled and parboiled. Both assumptions need filling in.
- Cook the beans firstTen minutes over a slow fire will not cook raw broad beans through. Shell them and boil in salted water until just tender — about 4 minutes for young beans, 8 or more for large ones — then drain and add them to the gravy for the final simmer, which is a flavouring step rather than a cooking one.
- A quart of beansMeasured shelled, a quart is roughly 4 cups, about 1 lb 4 oz, which is what you get from around 4 lb of beans in the pod. "Sufficient for a dish" suggests a vegetable side for four to six.
- Windsor beansBroad beans, the same thing sold today as fava. The Windsor was the standard large-seeded English garden variety. Frozen shelled favas work and skip the podding.
- Skin the older onesOnce the beans are past thumbnail size the grey outer skin turns leathery and bitter. Pinch it off after parboiling; the bright green kernels inside are the point of the dish.
- Rich brown gravyThe intended sauce is a made brown gravy built on meat stock rather than simply the pan drippings from a roast. A good reduced beef stock thickened lightly with a brown roux gives the same effect; allow about a cup for a quart of beans.
- SeasoningTwo teaspoons of salt for a quart is heavy once the gravy is also salted. Add half and correct at the end. The single teaspoon of sugar is doing real work — it flatters the beans' own sweetness and is worth keeping.
- Chives and parsleyTen minutes of simmering kills both. Simmer the onion in the gravy as directed, but stir the chives and parsley in during the last minute.
- "6d. a peck"A price for beans in the pod at market, not a quantity for this recipe. A peck is a dry measure of two gallons, so roughly 8 to 10 lb of unshelled broad beans.
- A note on favismBroad beans provoke a severe reaction in people with G6PD deficiency, which is common around the Mediterranean and in parts of Africa and South Asia. Worth knowing before serving them to guests.
Broad beans are among the oldest cultivated pulses in Europe, grown across the Mediterranean and northward long before the American haricot arrived, and for centuries in Britain "beans" commonly meant these. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century they were a cheap summer vegetable — the sixpence-a-peck price gives some sense of where they sat. The Windsor was a leading English garden strain, prized for the size of its seed, and stewing the beans in brown gravy rather than simply buttering them may reflect the habit of the well-stocked Victorian kitchen, where a household making brown sauce for meat had it to spare.