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Haricot Bean Salad
This is made from cold boiled beans. Add plenty of chopped parsley, rub the bowl with garlic, mix oil, salt, and pepper to taste, and pour over the beans, finally adding vinegar.
A bare outline of a dish that survives essentially unchanged as the Provençal and Italian bean salad. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so a few anchors help.
- The bean"Haricot" here means the dried white bean — cannellini, navy or coco blanc — not the green haricot vert. Two cups of drained cooked beans, from about 3/4 cup dry, makes four side servings.
- Dress them warmBeans take up oil and vinegar more readily while still warm; dressed cold, more of the seasoning sits on the surface. "Cold boiled beans" suggests a household using up yesterday's pot, but if you are cooking them fresh, dress at room temperature or a little above and let them sit an hour.
- Rubbing the bowl with garlicA halved raw clove drawn round the inside of a wooden or earthenware bowl leaves a faint perfume, not a garlic flavour. If you want the garlic to register, mince a clove into the oil instead.
- Proportions for the dressingThe recipe gives none; the amounts are left to the cook. Three parts oil to one of vinegar is a standard vinaigrette ratio, so for two cups of beans, roughly 4 tbsp olive oil and 1 to 1½ tbsp red wine vinegar.
- Vinegar last, and for a reasonVinegar last -- Acid slows the softening of pulses and tightens their skins. Dressing with oil and salt first is one reason often given for adding the vinegar at the end, though the recipe offers no explanation of its own.
- SaltingCooked pulses swallow salt. Season, wait ten minutes, taste again — the first seasoning will have disappeared.
- Parsley"Plenty" means plenty: a good handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped just before use, for two cups of beans. Sliced raw onion or shallot also sits well here.
Its brevity is part of the point — it is a thrift dish, built on the beans left from a boiling. Dried haricots were among the cheaper sources of protein in the late-Victorian British kitchen, though the technique on show is not English. The garlic-rubbed bowl, the oil, and the vinegar added last belong to the French and Italian bean salads that British cookery writers of the period were steadily absorbing, often under the general heading of "foreign" or "Continental" cookery. The name itself is generally traced to the French haricot, which by this period had settled onto the bean, though the word had earlier attached to a mutton stew.