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HARICOT BEANS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
Soak a pint of haricots overnight. Put them in a saucepan with three pints of cold water and a tea-spoonful of salt, and simmer for three hours. Try them by pressing between the fingers. When done they will crush readily and look floury. Drain them thoroughly, rinse and wipe the stewpan. Put back the haricots into it, and stir in two ounces of butter, add a pinch of pepper, a salt-spoonful of salt, three table-spoonfuls of the water in which they were boiled, and a dessert-spoonful of parsley finely chopped up and washed. Mix well together and serve.
A straightforward dish of dried white beans finished in parsley butter. The only real adjustment is the cooking time, which reflects beans that had often sat in a shop sack for a year or more.
- What haricots areDried white beans — cannellini, navy or flageolet all work. A pint measured dry is about two cups by US measure, or two and a half cups by the imperial pint this book would have used, so roughly 14 to 17 oz, which swells to a generous four to six servings as a side dish.
- Three hours is too longBeans bought today are far fresher. After an overnight soak, most white beans are tender in 45 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer. Start testing at 45 minutes and go by the finger test the recipe gives: they should crush easily and look floury inside.
- Salt in the waterThe salted cooking water here is sound practice, whatever you may have been told about salt toughening beans. Lightly salted water seasons them through and helps the skins stay intact.
- Keep it at a bare simmerA rolling boil bursts the skins and turns the pot cloudy. Hold the surface at a lazy shiver, lid ajar, and top up with boiling water if the beans threaten to break the surface.
- Old spoon measuresA salt-spoonful is about a quarter teaspoon; a dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. The two ounces of butter is four tablespoons, which is right for this quantity — it should coat, not pool.
- Save the cooking liquidThe three tablespoons of bean water are the point of the dish: their starch emulsifies with the butter into a light sauce. Do not tip the pot out before you have reserved some.
- FinishingAdd the butter off the heat or over the lowest flame and swirl rather than stir hard, or the beans will break up. A squeeze of lemon is the usual modern addition to a maitre d'hotel butter and is entirely in keeping.
"A la maitre d'hotel" in nineteenth-century cookery books means almost invariably the same simple finish: butter worked with chopped parsley, salt and pepper, and often lemon juice, named for the household steward rather than for any particular chef. It was applied to grilled steaks, boiled potatoes, fish and, as here, plain vegetables, and its frequency in books of the period says a good deal about how Anglo-French cookery handled anything boiled — a lump of butter and parsley stood in for a sauce. The haricot bean itself came to Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century, and the origin of the English name is unsettled, though it has often been linked to the older French meat stew called a haricot. In a Victorian kitchen dried beans were cheap, kept well and could be got at any time of year, which is why a dictionary of cookery gives them a place among the principles rather than the luxuries.