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Ham, with Windsor Beans
Windsor, or broad beans, are a favourite accompaniment to ham. They should be boiled until tender, then drained and steamed over the fire for a few minutes, with pepper, salt, and a small pat of butter. They may be placed round the ham or on a separate dish; and, if old, the skins should be taken off. Parsley and butter should be sent to table in a tureen. Time, according to the age of the beans, from fifteen to thirty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. per peck. Sufficient, a peck of beans for five or six persons.
A serving note rather than a full recipe, but the method is complete enough to follow. The main adjustments are the measure, the timing, and the assumption that the beans will be large and mealy.
- Windsor beansThese are broad beans, Vicia faba, sold today as fava beans. Victorian Windsor varieties were bred for size and were usually podded large; modern gardeners and greengrocers tend to pick them much younger.
- A peckA dry measure of two gallons, here meaning beans still in the pod. Expect somewhere around 2 lb of shelled beans from that volume, though pod-to-bean yield varies enormously with maturity, so buy by shelled weight if you can.
- TimingFifteen to thirty minutes suits the coarse, starchy old beans the book assumes. Small young beans need three to five minutes in boiling salted water; anything approaching a quarter of an hour turns them grey and pasty.
- Steamed over the fireProbably means returning the drained beans to the hot pan for a minute or two over low heat to drive off water; note that the recipe has the pepper, salt and butter going in at this stage rather than afterwards. It keeps the dish from turning watery on the plate.
- SkinningThe instruction to skin old beans is the one worth keeping. Once the beans are more than thumbnail-sized the outer coat is tough and bitter; blanch, then pinch each bean out of its skin, and the colour and sweetness improve out of all proportion to the effort.
- Parsley and butterThe Victorian sauce of that name is melted butter thickened slightly with flour and stirred with chopped parsley, not simply butter with herbs. A plain butter sauce or even good melted butter with parsley serves the same purpose alongside salty ham.
- ServingThe stated peck for five or six people is generous by modern appetites; allow around 4 oz shelled beans a head as a side dish.
- FavismBroad beans can cause acute haemolysis in people with G6PD deficiency, an inherited trait most common around the Mediterranean, Middle East and parts of Asia. Worth knowing if you are cooking for guests.
The broad bean is the oldest cultivated bean in Europe, grown here for millennia before New World beans arrived, and until the potato took over it was a staple of the English field and cottage garden alike. The Windsor was the standard large-seeded garden variety of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the pairing of broad beans with bacon or ham is long established in English cookery; the beans' faint bitterness and mealy texture answer the salt and fat of cured pork. Cassell's records a probable cost of sixpence a peck, which places broad beans among the cheap summer vegetables of the late Victorian market, and the instruction to skin old beans suggests they were often used well past the young and tender stage.