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Beans, French, with Gravy
Dissolve four ounces of butter in a pan, and stir into it three ounces of flour till it becomes brown and quite smooth. Mix a little gravy and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Souse and simmer the beans, previously boiled, in this mixture for twenty minutes. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. per pound. Allow one quart of beans for six or seven persons.
A brown-roux dressing for green beans, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen that assumed a stockpot was already on the stove. Two things need attention: the vague quantity of gravy, and the twenty-minute simmer.
- The hinge: cut the second cookingThe beans are already boiled. Twenty more minutes in sauce turns them olive-grey and slack. Two or three minutes, just long enough to heat through and take on the sauce, is what the dish actually wants.
- "A little gravy" is not a measurement"A little gravy" is not a measurement hree fllour make a substantial roux — enough for a pint or more of liquid, and more than that if the flour is well browned. Add good brown stock or meat gravy gradually and stop when the sauce coats a spoon, rather than working to a fixed figure.
- Scale the roux downFor a quart of beans serving six or seven, 4 oz butter and 3 oz flour is generous by modern taste. Half those amounts with a scant half-pint of stock gives a sauce that dresses the beans rather than smothers them.
- "Souse""Souse" — Here it means simply to immerse or drench the beans in the sauce, not the pickling sense the word carries in fish cookery.
- Browning the flourCook the butter and flour over moderate heat until it is the colour of a hazelnut shell and smells toasted, five to eight minutes with steady stirring. Brown roux thickens less than pale roux, which is why the proportion of flour looks high.
- A quart of beansA quart of beans — Beans were sold and measured by volume. A quart of trimmed French beans is very roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb (about 450–570 g), which would stretch to six or seven as a side dish.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a small amount; pre-ground nutmeg from a jar is flat and will taste dusty against a brown sauce.
- The cost line"2d. to 4d. per pound" is late-Victorian retail pricing in pence, included so a cook could budget a menu. It has no bearing on the method.
Cassell's ran a whole family of French bean entries — boiled, buttered, "a la maitre d'hotel", with gravy — because the same trimmed and blanched beans could be finished in half a dozen ways from whatever was in the larder, and this one leans on the sort of brown sauce a Victorian kitchen might well have had to hand. The dish belongs to the English adaptation of French sauce cookery: master a brown roux, thin it with stock, and a plain vegetable becomes a course. "French beans" in this period meant the immature pods of the common bean eaten whole, distinguished from the shelled broad beans that had been the older English staple; the origin of the name is uncertain, and it is often said to point to the pods' arrival on English tables through Continental market gardening rather than to any French cooking method. The instruction to boil first and sauce afterwards suggests a kitchen working ahead in stages.