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BEANS, HARICOT (a la Bretonne)
Put some butter into a stewpan with a chopped onion and a little flour. Brown, but do not blacken the butter; pour in a little broth, or water. Stir till it is slightly thick, and season with salt and pepper. Put in the haricots already cooked by boiling; simmer them about twenty minutes in the broth and serve hot. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per quart. Allow one quart for six or seven persons.
A brown-roux bean stew of the plainest kind, and the whole thing turns on the colour of the butter and onion at the start. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: brown, not blackThe butter, onion and flour want a steady medium heat until the flour smells nutty and turns the colour of weak tea, five to eight minutes with constant stirring. Scorched flour is bitter and cannot be rescued once the liquid goes in.
- HaricotsIn British usage these are dried white beans; a US market sells something similar as navy or (loosely) cannellini. About 10 to 12 oz dried, soaked overnight and simmered until tender, gives roughly the quart the recipe assumes. Two 15-oz tins, drained, come to a little under a quart and are a fair substitute.
- "A little broth"Start with about a cup for a quart of beans and add more as it thickens; you want the beans coated, not soupy. Unsalted stock is safer here, since the sauce reduces during the twenty minutes.
- The twenty minutesThis is not to cook the beans — they are already cooked — but to let the roux lose its raw edge and the onion melt into the sauce. Stir now and then; a flour-thickened sauce with beans in it catches on the bottom readily.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper, and a good deal more than the recipe implies. A bay leaf, a little garlic, or a spoonful of tomato purée are all within the tradition of a bretonne and lift a very plain dish.
- Yield and costThe pricing in old pence is a period artefact only. A quart serves six or seven as a side dish, three or four as a main with bread.
- ServingTraditionally sent to table with roast or braised lamb, particularly leg of mutton.
À la bretonne means in the manner of Brittany, and in nineteenth-century French cookery the term attached itself most commonly to white haricot beans in a browned onion sauce, served with mutton or lamb, though it also covered a garnish of shredded leek, celery, onion and mushroom. The association is often said to come from the fields of Brittany and neighbouring Vendée, long a source of dried white beans for French kitchens, though the sauce itself is standard Parisian restaurant technique — a brown roux slackened with stock. Cassell's, compiling for British households in the later Victorian decades, kept the French name while stripping the method down to something a domestic cook could manage on a range. The cost note in pence per quart is characteristic of the book: cheap and filling.