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BEANS, FRENCH (a la Francaise)
Cut and boil one pound of French beans; drain well and put them into a stewpan over the fire to dry or absorb the moisture; shake the pan that they may not burn. When quite free from the water add three ounces of fresh butter, the juice of half a lemon, pepper, salt, and a table-spoonful of good gravy. Keep shaking the stewpan until the beans are quite hot, and serve quickly. Time, quarter of an hour to boil; ten minutes to stew. Probable cost, from 2d. to 4d. per pound. Sufficient for two persons.
A straightforward buttered green bean dish whose only real fault is Victorian boiling time. Everything else translates directly.
- French beansThese are ordinary green beans — the whole immature pod, called haricots verts in French usage. Nineteenth-century varieties were generally coarser and stringier than modern stringless ones, though the long boiling time here is also simply the Victorian norm for vegetables.
- The boiling timeA quarter of an hour will give you olive-drab, collapsing beans. Modern varieties need 3 to 5 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until just tender with a little resistance left. Drain immediately.
- Drying the beansThis is the step that matters. Returning the drained beans to a dry pan over heat drives off surface water so the butter coats rather than slides. Thirty seconds to a minute of shaking is enough; the original ten-minute stew is far too long once the beans are properly cooked.
- "Good gravy"Not thickened brown sauce but the concentrated meat juices from a roast, or a spoonful of reduced beef or veal stock. A tablespoon of well-reduced stock does the job; skip it entirely for a vegetarian version and add a little more lemon.
- Three ounces of butterAbout 85 g for a pound of beans, which is generous by any standard. Half that makes a properly glossy dish; the full amount is closer to a sauce.
- Order of seasoningAdd the lemon juice off the heat or at the very end. Held over the fire, the acid dulls the green colour.
- YieldThe book says two persons, which reflects Victorian vegetable portions. A pound of beans dressed this richly will serve three to four as a side.
- CostTwopence to fourpence a pound, quoted as the book gives it; a cheap vegetable, though not the cheapest available.
French beans reached European kitchens from the Americas in the sixteenth century and were long grown in English gardens for their pods rather than their dried seed, unlike the broad bean that preceded them. Cassell's appears in the late Victorian moment when English cookery writers were consciously borrowing lighter treatments of vegetables, and the spoonful of meat gravy reflects a kitchen where the roasting pan was always within reach.