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HARICOT BEANS, TO BOIL (another way)
Soak and boil a quart of the beans, as in the last recipe. Drain them, and keep them hot. Mix an ounce of flour very smoothly over the fire with two ounces of fresh butter, add a quarter of a pint of boiling stock or water, a little salt and pepper, and a table-spoonful of scalded and chopped parsley. Put in the beans, shake the saucepan over the fire till they are well mixed with the sauce, and serve as hot as possible. The flour and gravy may be omitted, and a little lemon-juice squeezed over the beans just before they are sent up to table. Time, two hours to boil the beans. Probable cost, 4d. per quart. Sufficient, one quart for eight or ten persons.
A plain velouté-style butter sauce folded through boiled dried beans. The only real technique here is the roux, and the original quantities make it much thicker than most cooks will want.
- What a quart of beans meansThis is a dry measure of the uncooked beans: an imperial quart holds roughly 1¾ to 2 lb of dried haricots, which swells to something close to 12 cups cooked. The stated yield of eight to ten is realistic only as a side dish; halve or quarter the batch for a household.
- Haricot beansIn British books of this period "haricot" means any dried white bean — what a modern shop sells as navy, cannellini or small white beans. Any of them works; smaller beans such as navy tend to survive long cooking better than large thin-skinned ones.
- The boiling timeTwo hours assumes beans of unknown age and hard water. Well-soaked modern haricots are usually tender in 60 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer. Cook to the bean, not the clock, and keep the water at a tremble — a hard boil splits the skins.
- SaltingNothing is said about when to salt: the recipe's salt goes into the sauce, not the bean water. Salt the cooking water lightly from the start or add it toward the end; either produces good results. Salting the pot heavily from the outset is often said to slow softening, though the evidence for that is weak — acid and hard water matter more.
- The sauce quantitiesOne ounce flour cooked in two ounces butter, let down with a quarter of an imperial pint (5 fl oz, about 140 ml), gives a paste rather than a pouring sauce. Expect to add another 5 to 8 fl oz of hot stock, whisked in gradually, before it will coat the beans.
- "Scalded" parsleyDip the chopped parsley in boiling water for a few seconds and drain it hard. It fixes the colour and takes the raw edge off. Fresh chopped parsley stirred in off the heat is a fair modern substitute.
- The lemon variationThe alternative — no roux, just butter and lemon juice over the hot drained beans — is the better dish of the two, and needs the beans to be very hot and very well drained or the juice pools at the bottom of the bowl.
- Serving"As hot as possible" is the operative instruction. The flour sauce sets and dulls as it cools, so dress the beans at the last moment and send them straight out.
Cassell's was compiled for middle-class kitchens keeping a close eye on cost, and the note "probable cost, 4d. per quart" is the point of the entry as much as the sauce is: dried haricots were among the cheapest sources of protein on the Victorian table, and a dish feeding eight or ten for fourpence needed no further argument. The name comes from the French haricot, a word applied both to the bean and, confusingly, to a mutton stew — the two are usually traced to separate roots, the bean name generally derived from a Nahuatl word for the New World bean and the stew from the old French verb harigoter, to cut up. The treatment given here is a butter-and-flour sauce. The second, simpler suggestion — butter and lemon alone — is closer to how the beans are still eaten around the Mediterranean.