Home › The Principles of Cookery › Haricot Beans, to Boil
Haricot Beans, to Boil
Wash and pick the beans, and soak them in cold water overnight. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan with plenty of cold water, add a pinch of salt, and let them simmer gently until tender. Pour the water from them, let them stand by the fire, shaking them once or twice to assist their drying, then add a small piece of butter and a little pepper and salt, and serve as hot as possible. Time, two hours to boil. Probable cost, 2d. or 3d. per pint. Sufficient, one pint for three or four persons.
A plain method for dried white beans that still works, with two details worth adjusting: what "haricot" means here, and how long the beans really need.
- What haricot beans areNot green beans. In British usage of this period "haricot" means the small dried white bean sold today as navy or haricot bean — the same thing used for baked beans. Cannellini or Great Northern will behave much the same, though they cook a little faster.
- A pint of beansMeasured dry, not cooked: roughly 2 cups, about 14 oz to 1 lb, which will swell to something like 5 cups cooked. The stated yield of three or four servings is on the generous side by modern portions.
- Two hours is a maximumBeans in a Victorian larder could be several years old and cooked accordingly. Reasonably fresh dried beans, soaked overnight, are usually tender in 45 minutes to 90 minutes. Start tasting at 45 minutes.
- The pinch of saltSalting the cooking water does not prevent beans from softening, despite the old warning; what does toughen skins is acid, so keep tomato, vinegar and lemon out until the beans are tender. Salt more assertively than a pinch and the beans will actually taste seasoned through.
- Simmer, do not boilThe hinge of the recipe. A hard rolling boil bursts the skins and turns the outsides to mush while the centres are still chalky. Keep the pot at a bare tremble and top up with hot water so the beans stay covered.
- Standing by the fireThis is the drying-off step: returning the drained beans to the dry pan over the lowest heat for a minute or two so surface water evaporates and the butter coats rather than dilutes. Worth doing — it is the difference between buttered beans and watery ones.
- Butter quantity"A small piece" for a pint of dried beans means about 1 to 2 tablespoons. Chopped parsley, a little lemon or a scrape of garlic all belong here if you want more than the plain version.
- Cost2d. or 3d. per pint places this among the cheapest dishes in the book.
Dried haricots were a workhorse pulse of the nineteenth-century British kitchen: cheap, keeping well in a dry jar, and useful as a vegetable, a soup base and a bulking agent in stews — the haricot of mutton stews takes its name from the same French word, though that dish more likely derives from the older verb harigoter, to cut up, than from the bean. The overnight soak and the long simmer reflect a period when dried goods were bought loose from a grocer's bin and might be of any age, and when a coal range gave you slow background heat for hours at little extra cost.