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BEANS, FRENCH (a la Provencale)
Brown some slices of onion with oil instead of butter; make them of a light brown, and add some French beans that have been prepared and boiled in the ordinary way, with chopped parsley, thyme, chives, and bay-leaf. As soon as the vegetables are done, remove them on to a dish put a little vinegar into the pan, boil it up and throw it over the beans. If oil be disliked, fry the onions in butter, and add gravy instead of vinegar. The juice of a lemon is sometimes preferred.
A short, complete method that assumes you already have cooked green beans on hand. The whole point is the deglaze at the end, so keep the pan hot when the vinegar goes in.
- "French beans"Ordinary green beans — the whole immature pod, not a shelled bean. Top and tail them and leave whole or halve. The book does not say how long to boil them, and "in the ordinary way" would have meant a longer boil than we now use; for a modern rendering, salted water until just tender, 4-6 minutes, then drained. Modern practice is to shock them in cold water so they hold their colour while you cook the onions.
- The hingeThe vinegar is a deglaze, not a dressing. Pull the beans out first, add the vinegar to the hot oily pan, let it bubble and reduce for a few seconds so the harshness cooks off, then pour it over. Sloshing cold vinegar over beans in a dish gives a completely different, sharper result.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For 1 lb of beans, use one medium onion sliced thin, 2-3 tablespoons of oil, a tablespoon of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of thyme leaves, a tablespoon of chives and one bay leaf, with 1-2 tablespoons of red or white wine vinegar. Serves four as a side.
- "Light brown" onionsNot caramelised. Medium heat, 6-8 minutes, until the edges colour and the slices go limp. Past dark brown the onion turns bitter and the vinegar has nothing to balance.
- The oilA Provencal recipe in a Victorian English book flags oil as the unfamiliar element, hence the butter alternative. Use a decent olive oil; the flavour of the finished dish is largely the oil and the vinegar.
- Herbs and the bay leafAdd the soft herbs late, with the beans, so the parsley and chives stay green. Remove the bay leaf before serving — it is there for perfume, not for eating.
- The variationsWith butter, the "gravy" called for is meat stock, a couple of tablespoons reduced in the pan. The lemon option wants the juice off the heat, added at the last moment, since boiling flattens it.
Cassell's marks this "a la Provencale" chiefly by the oil: for a late nineteenth-century English kitchen, frying in olive oil rather than butter was itself the regional signature, and the book pauses to reassure readers who might dislike it. The recipe assumes the beans have been boiled in the ordinary way beforehand, and the pan of browned onions, herbs and an acid finish is what turns them into something worth sending up. Green beans themselves had been grown in Britain since the sixteenth century and were long called French beans, a name often said to distinguish the pod-eaten New World Phaseolus vulgaris from the older broad bean, and one that survives on seed packets and in older cookbooks well into the twentieth century.