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Beans, French, Salad Of
Take cold cooked beans which have been well drained from the water. Saturate them with vinegar, and let them lie in it for twenty minutes. Drain again, and add some oil, if liked, and a little pepper and salt. Beans may be eaten with any salad sauce.
A plain vinaigrette treatment for leftover green beans, written when cold cooked vegetables dressed with vinegar were a standard side rather than a composed salad.
- "French beans"The British name for green beans — the whole young pod, eaten pod and all. Not haricots or any dried bean.
- Cook them first, brieflyThe recipe assumes beans already boiled. Modern practice is 3-5 minutes in well-salted boiling water, then straight into ice water, which keeps them green and firm. Victorian kitchens boiled them considerably longer, and some cooks added a pinch of soda to hold the colour.
- Dry them properly"Well drained" is the hinge. Beans still wet from the pot dilute the vinegar and the dressing slides off. Spread them on a towel until the surface is dry to the touch.
- The twenty-minute soakStraight vinegar for twenty minutes is a quick pickle, not a marinade. It will soften the beans slightly and strip some colour. Cutting the vinegar with the oil from the start gives a fresher result if you would rather not have them sharp.
- ProportionsNone are given. A conventional dressing is three parts oil to one of vinegar; here the beans are steeped in vinegar first and the oil added afterwards and only 'if liked', so taste before adding more acid.
- "Any salad sauce"That would cover a plain vinaigrette, a mustard-sharpened dressing, or a boiled cream-and-egg salad dressing. Mayonnaise also works, though it wants the beans drained more thoroughly still.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, about 1 lb of cooked beans will dress four as a side.
Cold vegetable salads of this kind — a boiled vegetable steeped in vinegar and finished with oil — were a staple of the late-Victorian cold table, where they sat alongside sliced meats and were a convenient way of using up the previous day's boiled greens. The hedging phrase "add some oil, if liked" suggests a British kitchen still faintly suspicious of salad oil, though how far that reflects the cost or the frequent rancidity of the oil, or a habit of leaving it out in favour of vinegar alone, is a matter of inference from the recipe itself. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households running on economy, gives the barest frame and expects the cook to judge quantities — a habit of nineteenth-century recipe writing generally, and of its vegetable entries in particular.