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Beans, Haricot, Plain Boiled
Sprinkle over one quart of haricot beans, previously boiled, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, and put them with two ounces of butter into a stewpan. Let them get thoroughly heated; shake the pan, and in about fifteen minutes serve in a hot vegetable dish. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. per quart. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A dressed-bean side dish rather than a cooking method — the book assumes you have already boiled the beans and tells you only how to finish them. The whole first stage is left to the reader.
- What haricot beans areDried white beans of the navy, cannellini or flageolet type, not fresh green beans (which older books call French beans). Any small to medium white bean works.
- The missing first step"Previously boiled" means soaked overnight, then simmered in unsalted or lightly salted water until tender — roughly 1 to 1½ hours for navy beans, longer if old. Drain well, or the butter will not cling.
- QuantityOne quart of cooked beans is roughly 1½ lb, which would come from something like 1½ cups (10-11 oz) of dried beans; the recipe does not make clear whether the quart is measured before or after boiling. Two or three 15-oz tins, drained and rinsed, are a fair substitute.
- ButterTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons. That is generous for a quart of beans and is the point of the dish; do not cut it to a smear or you get dry beans with parsley on them.
- Fifteen minutes is too longCooked beans reheat in a covered pan in five minutes and break up if pushed further, especially with shaking. Heat until steaming and the butter has coated everything, then stop.
- Season itThe original names no salt or pepper. Cooked beans need both; salt at the end, when the butter is in, and a little lemon juice does no harm.
- Cost note"4d. to 6d. per quart" is pre-decimal pence and tells you the beans were among the cheapest bulk foods in the shop, not anything about modern price.
- YieldSix or seven as a side dish, as stated - reasonable, at a bit over half a cup of beans each.
Cassell's places this among the plain vegetable dishes of the late Victorian kitchen, where dried haricots were valued precisely because they kept well, cost pennies, and carried butter well. The name comes to English from French haricot, though how the bean sense arose is unsettled — it has been linked, disputedly, to the beans arriving in Europe from the Americas and being folded into an older French stew term; by the nineteenth century it meant the dried white bean itself. Recipes of this kind — boil, then finish with butter and chopped parsley — belong to no particular national tradition: it is the standard English answer to a cooked vegetable that needs to reach the table tasting of something.