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Beans, French, to Stew
This is an excellent accompaniment to venison, veal, or any other cutlets. The beans should be cut, boiled, and drained according to recipe given for boiled beans. Then take a rich brown gravy, well flavoured with pepper and salt, put it into a stewpan, and when hot add the beans and simmer over a slow fire. Shake the pan to prevent them from burning, and serve in fifteen minutes. The cutlets may be put in the centre, or they may be served on the beans and gravy. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. per pound.
A simple side of green beans finished in brown gravy, from a period when a stockpot of meat gravy was always to hand. The main adjustment is the total cooking time.
- French beansVictorian "French beans" are a fresh green pod bean, not flageolets or any dried white bean; period books treat scarlet runners as a related but separate vegetable, prepared the same way. Modern slender green beans need only 3-4 minutes in salted boiling water before draining; coarser older beans were strung and cut on the diagonal into lozenges first.
- The hinge: don't boil twiceThe beans are already cooked when they go into the gravy. Fifteen minutes of simmering on top of a full boil will turn them olive-drab and limp. Blanch them briefly, refresh in cold water, and give them only 2-3 minutes in the hot gravy to heat through and take up flavour.
- "A rich brown gravy"This means proper meat gravy — reduced brown stock, or the deglazed pan juices from the cutlets, often thickened with a little brown roux. Roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup for a pound of beans: enough to coat, not to drown.
- Slow fireA low burner or the cool side of the range. Since the beans are only warming through, keep the gravy at a bare simmer so it doesn't reduce to a paste.
- Shaking the panSound advice with a thick reduced gravy over direct heat — it keeps the sugars in the stock from catching. A heavy-based pan and low heat do the same job.
- ServingA pound of beans serves four as a side. The dish is built for presentation: heap the beans and gravy on a warm platter and set the cutlets in the middle, or lay the cutlets over the top so the gravy serves both.
- The costing"2d. to 4d. per pound" is in pre-decimal pence and presumably refers to the beans themselves; it is of historical interest only.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English gravy, and its logic was to give every vegetable a share of it. Stewing an already-boiled vegetable in meat gravy is characteristic of nineteenth-century English cookery. The name "French bean" for the common green bean goes back well before this book and reflects the plant's arrival in England by way of the Continent, though the species itself is American in origin. Serving cutlets in the centre of a ring of vegetable, as suggested here, suited the dinner-table arrangements of the period, when dishes were composed to be looked at before they were carved.