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Green Bean Pudding
Take one pound of old green beans, put them into boiling water, and boil them until tender. Blanch and pound them, and season them with one tea-spoonful of salt and half a tea-spoonful of pepper. Add the yolk of an egg, and two or three table-spoonfuls of cream; then boil the mixture in a buttered basin; turn it out before serving, and pour over it some good parsley sauce. It should be served with boiled bacon. Time to boil, about one hour and a half. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian vegetable pudding: boiled beans pounded to a paste, bound with egg and cream, and steamed in a basin. The instructions assume a kitchen where a basin sat in a pan of simmering water all afternoon.
- What "old green beans" means"Old" signals beans left on the plant past their tender stage — tough-skinned and starchy, which is why they are boiled and pounded rather than served whole. Whether Cassell's intends mature French beans or shelled broad (fava) beans is genuinely ambiguous; if 'blanch' here means skinning, broad beans, whose skins slip off after boiling, would fit.
- Blanch means peel hereBlanch may mean peel here -- "Blanch" in this period covers both a brief plunge in boiling water and, as with almonds, slipping off skins. Since the beans are already boiled tender at this point, skinning them before pounding is the reading that makes sense.
- Boil in a buttered basinThis is a steamed pudding, not an oven-baked one. Butter a heatproof basin, fill it, cover with pleated foil or a tied cloth, and stand it in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up the sides, topping up as it boils away.
- The hinge: dry the puréePounded beans hold a great deal of water, and a wet purée will never set with one yolk and a few spoonfuls of cream. Drain thoroughly and dry the mash over low heat before seasoning, or the pudding will slump when turned out.
- An hour and a half is generousThe recipe allows about one hour and a half. A smaller modern basin will likely be set through sooner; test with a skewer, which should come out clean and hot.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt to a pound of beans is on the heavy side, particularly as the pudding is meant to accompany boiled bacon. Season the purée to taste and account for the salt of the meat.
- Parsley sauceThe Victorian version is a white sauce — butter, flour, milk — finished with a good handful of chopped parsley, sometimes with a little of the bacon liquor. Make it while the pudding steams and keep it warm rather than reheating.
- Cost and yield5d. is the pre-decimal price for the whole dish, a marker of how cheap it was. It serves four or five as a side with boiled bacon, not as a main course.
The logic of the dish is thrift: beans that had grown too big and tough for the table were still perfectly edible once boiled soft, skinned and pounded to a purée. Steamed savoury puddings of this kind — pease pudding being the best-known survivor — were common nineteenth-century partners to boiled salt pork and bacon, the starchy, mildly seasoned mass balancing the salt of the meat. Parsley sauce was a usual accompaniment to boiled bacon in British kitchens of the period, so pouring it over the pudding as well would have needed no second sauce. The dish belongs to a household economy in which little from the kitchen garden was wasted, and in which a covered basin could sit in a pan on the range while other things cooked around it.