Home › The Principles of Cookery › Beans, Haricot, Puree Of
Beans, Haricot, Puree Of
Soak half a pound of haricot beans in water with a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda; let them stand overnight, and boil for four hours. Rub the beans through a sieve; make a sauce with one ounce of butter, one ounce of flour, and milk; beat one egg and mix it with half a tea-spoonful of salt, and a quarter of a tea-spoonful of cayenne pepper. Add this to the sauce and pour it over the beans. Have another egg hard-boiled, cut it into slices, put the slices round a greased mould, pour the mixture in, cover with buttered paper, steam for one and a half hours, and serve with parsley sauce. Probable cost, 9d.
A steamed bean timbale rather than a soup, despite the name. The recipe's weak point is that it never tells you how much milk to use, and the quantity decides whether the mixture sets.
- The milk is the hingeAim for about 1/2 pint (roughly 300 ml) of milk with the ounce each of butter and flour, cooked down to a thick, spoon-coating béchamel. Any thinner and the moulded purée may not hold its shape when turned out.
- Skip the carbonate of sodaA teaspoonful of soda in the soaking water was standard for hard water and old, dry beans. It softens skins quickly but flattens the flavour, greys the colour and destroys much of the thiamine. Plain water, or water with a little salt, works better with modern dried beans.
- Cooking timeFour hours suits older, drier beans than most kitchens now buy. Haricots soaked overnight are usually tender in 1 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer; test rather than time, since they must be soft enough to sieve.
- SievingRubbing through a sieve gives a smoother purée than a food processor, which tends to turn beans gluey. A mouli or ricer is the closest quick equivalent, followed by a sieve for the skins.
- CayenneA quarter teaspoon of cayenne in half a pound of beans is noticeable heat. Start with an eighth if you want the bean flavour forward.
- Mould and liningUse a pudding basin or charlotte mould of about 1 1/2 to 2 pints, well buttered, with the hard-boiled egg slices pressed round the sides. Buttered paper means a round of buttered parchment; cover it with foil or a tied cloth so no condensation drips in.
- SteamingNinety minutes at a steady simmer with water halfway up the mould. The centre should feel firm and a skewer come out clean. Let it stand five minutes before turning out or the egg slices tear away.
- Parsley sauceAnother white sauce, 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to 1/2 pint milk, with a good handful of chopped parsley stirred in off the heat. Make it while the mould steams.
- YieldServes three or four as a supper dish or a vegetable course. The 9d costing is late-Victorian retail and is only useful as a marker of how cheap the dish was meant to be.
Haricot beans arrived in British kitchens as a cheap, keepable protein, and this is one of the meatless made dishes that could fill out a lower-middle-class table on days when meat was thin on the ground. The word purée is used here in its older, broader sense of anything sieved to a smooth pulp, not necessarily a soup; bound with a béchamel and egg and steamed in a lined mould, it belongs to the same family as the timbales and vegetable puddings that fill the entremets sections of nineteenth-century cookbooks. The soda in the soaking water is a period tell: London and much of the south-east has hard water, whose calcium keeps bean skins tough, and alkali was the household remedy long before anyone explained the chemistry. The hard-boiled egg pressed round the mould is characteristic Victorian presentation, the same instinct that decorated a raised pie or a jellied mould, on a dish costing well under a shilling.