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Beans, Haricot, Soup
Wash half a pint of haricot beans, and soak them for some hours in cold water. Put them in a saucepan with one pint of water or stock, let it come to the boil, and skim it well. Take one onion, half a turnip, and one potato, wash them well, cut them into pieces, and add them to the beans. Skim thoroughly as it begins again to boil, and let it simmer gently for two hours. Press all the ingredients through a colander or sieve, add half a pint of milk, and salt and pepper to taste; return the soup to the saucepan to boil again before serving. Probable cost, 6d.
A plain purée soup of the sort Cassell's offers as a cheap winter standby. Two things need attention: the liquid is far too little as written, and the sieving step is what makes or breaks the texture.
- Add more liquidHalf a pint of dried beans swells to roughly two or three times its dry volume, so a single pint of water will be largely absorbed before the two hours are up. Start with two to three times the stated liquid — a quart or more of water or stock — and top up as it simmers.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of beans is about 1¼ US cups, roughly 8 oz dried, and the half pint of milk is about 1¼ cups. Haricots here are dried white beans: navy, cannellini or flageolet all work.
- Soaking and salt"Some hours" means overnight for older beans. The traditional rule is to hold the salt until the beans are fully tender, though the claim that salted water slows softening is disputed and salt may in fact help the skins soften; acid ingredients are the surer cause of stubborn beans.
- Two hours is a guide, not a ruleSoaked haricots usually collapse in 60–90 minutes. Beans that have sat in a cupboard for two years may take longer than two hours or never soften at all.
- The sievePressing through a colander leaves a coarse, grainy soup. A food mill gives the intended texture, and a blender followed by a pass through a fine sieve gives a smoother one; either way, keep the cooking liquid and thin the purée back with it.
- The milkAdd the milk off the boil, then reheat gently. A bean purée is thick and catches easily once dairy is in it, so stir the bottom of the pan and do not walk away.
- SeasoningAs written this is very plain. A bay leaf and a few peppercorns in the simmering water, and a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of butter at the end, lift it considerably.
- YieldAbout 1½ quarts, enough for four as a first course or two or three as a main with bread.
Haricot beans reached British kitchens from the New World by way of France, and the name itself is French — often traced to the bean's long association with haricot de mouton, a mutton stew, though the etymology is disputed and the bean may simply have taken its name from the dish it was cooked in. By the 1870s and 1880s, when Cassell's was compiling its dictionary, dried haricots were a staple of the cheap cookery movement: they kept indefinitely, cost little, and were promoted by writers and school-of-cookery lecturers as a source of nourishment for working households that could not afford much meat. The "probable cost, 6d" appended to the recipe is characteristic of the book, which priced nearly every dish so that a mistress could budget a week of meals — sixpence for a soup serving four was cheap even then, and the meatless version using water rather than stock made it usable on fast days.