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BEANS, FRENCH (Haricots Verts)
Boil and drain the beans in the usual way, and put them into a stewpan with some butter thickened with flour. Add chopped parsley, thyme, chives, etc., and a small cupful of stock; season to taste with salt and pepper. Stew for some time, then thicken with two eggs well beaten up with a little milk or cream, and serve quickly. A little lemon-juice may also be added. Time to stew, ten minutes. Probable cost, from 2d. to 4d. per pound.
A green bean fricassee finished with an egg liaison — the technique matters more than the ingredient list. Two points decide whether it works.
- Never let it boil after the eggs go inThe beaten eggs and cream are a liaison, not a batter. Once they are stirred in, keep the pan off direct heat or on the barest simmer and stir until the sauce coats a spoon; a boil will scramble it into curds. If lemon juice is used, add it at the very end, off the heat, since acid encourages the eggs to seize.
- "Boil in the usual way"The entry gives no boiling time, and recipes of this period generally boiled green beans well beyond what we would now. Modern taste wants 3-5 minutes for slim haricots verts, up to 6 for fatter beans, then a drain — cook them just short of done, since they get a further ten minutes in the sauce.
- Reconsider the ten-minute stewBeans already boiled and then stewed ten minutes in stock will turn khaki and soft. Four or five minutes is enough to marry them with the sauce if you want them green; the longer time gives the older, deliberately tender result.
- Butter thickened with flourThis may be read as beurre manie — equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, about 1 tbsp each for a pound of beans — whisked into the hot stock in small pieces rather than melted in the dry pan; the phrase can equally mean butter and flour cooked briefly together as a white roux.
- A small cupful of stockAmbiguous in the original; roughly 1/2 cup (120 ml) is right for a pound of beans, enough to make a bound sauce rather than a soup. Chicken or veal stock suits it; a light vegetable stock works.
- Chives and thymeUse the thyme sparingly — a teaspoon of leaves at most — and add the chives and parsley near the end, since chives lose everything with cooking. Chervil, if you can get it, belongs in this company.
- Yield and costThe pricing is per pound of beans, in pre-decimal pence, and tells you only that these were cheap summer produce. A pound of beans dressed this way serves four as a side dish.
Eating the bean pod whole and immature, rather than shelling it for the dried seed, is a comparatively late refinement — the vegetable and the manner of dressing it both came in with French practice. The bean itself is American in origin, carried to Europe after the Spanish contact with the New World and long grown chiefly for the dried pulse. What Cassell's is really teaching here is the liaison: finishing a sauce with beaten egg and cream, the same move that turns a blanquette or a fricassee. The vegetable is almost a vehicle for the lesson, which is why the entry is so brief about the beans and so precise about the order of operations.