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Beans, Broad or Windsor, with Ham or Bacon
This is a very popular dish. The beans must be boiled separately and not with the ham. They should be young, and shelled only just before cooking. Put them into boiling water with a little salt, boil very quickly, drain, and pour parsley sauce over them. Place the ham on the beans. Time, fifteen to twenty minutes to boil. Probable cost, 6d. to 8d. per peck. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A plain English summer dish that depends entirely on the age of the beans. The instructions are terse because the book assumes you have already boiled a ham and made parsley sauce elsewhere in the volume.
- The hinge: bean sizeEverything here rests on "they should be young." Small, pale-green broad beans need only 3-5 minutes in boiling salted water; the fifteen to twenty minutes given suits the large, floury late-season beans the Victorians often had to work with and will reduce young ones to mush. Taste one at three minutes and go from there.
- Older beans need skinningIf the beans are large and the outer skin has gone grey and leathery, boil them, cool briefly, and slip each one out of its jacket. The book does not mention this step. Skinned beans are bright green and sweet; unskinned mature ones are tough and can taste bitter.
- A peckA peck is a dry measure of two gallons, roughly 8-9 lb of broad beans still in the pod, which shelled would yield something on the order of 2-2.5 lb of beans. Note that the recipe gives 6d. to 8d. as a price per peck rather than stating how much to buy. The figure is Victorian pricing and suggests a cheap seasonal vegetable.
- Shell at the last minuteThe instruction to shell "only just before cooking" is sound and worth keeping. Shelled broad beans dry out and toughen at the cut end fairly quickly.
- Parsley sauceConventionally a white sauce - butter, flour and milk - with a good handful of chopped parsley stirred in off the heat. Salt it lightly; the ham is doing most of that work.
- The hamA boiled or baked gammon joint, carved into thickish slices and laid over the dressed beans. Any good cooked ham serves. Broad beans and cured pork is a deliberate pairing, not a garnish.
- Boil hard, drain hard"Boil very quickly" means a full rolling boil in plenty of water, uncovered, which keeps the colour. Drain thoroughly before saucing or the sauce will thin and slide off.
- A note on favismBroad beans (Vicia faba) can trigger a severe haemolytic reaction in people with G6PD deficiency, an inherited condition most common in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and South Asian populations. Cooking does not remove the risk. Not a fault of the recipe, but worth knowing if you are feeding guests.
The broad bean is the oldest cultivated bean in Europe, grown here long before the runner and haricot beans arrived from the Americas, and for centuries it was simply "the bean." "Windsor" denotes the large, flat-seeded garden varieties bred for size and long a staple of English kitchen gardens. Pairing them with bacon or ham is very old English practice - the beans come in from May through July, and a boiled gammon was a familiar dish, so the two met on the plate as a matter of seasonal convenience as much as taste. Cassell's insists that the beans be boiled separately rather than with the ham, a preference for keeping the beans green and the sauce clean rather than grey and salty.