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Haricot Beans, to Stew
Soak and boil half a pint of beans in the usual way. Drain and dry them. Cut four ounces of bacon into dice, pour some boiling water on it for a few minutes, drain it, then put it into a stewpan. Shake the pan over the fire till the bacon is lightly browned, pour over it a quarter of a pint of brown gravy thickened with flour, and a finely-minced onion. Season with pepper and salt, and simmer for a quarter of an hour. Add the beans, let them stew a quarter of an hour longer, and serve. Time, two hours or more to boil the beans. Probable cost, 4d. per quart. Sufficient for four persons.
A plain French-style bean and bacon stew, written for cooks who already knew how to boil pulses. Two things carry it: the beans must be fully tender before they meet the gravy, and the bacon is blanched before browning.
- "Half a pint of beans"A dry volume measure: half an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, so roughly 1¼ cups, around 8 oz, of dried white haricots (navy or cannellini both work). That yields something like 2½ to 3 cups cooked, which is on the modest side for four people as written.
- "Boil in the usual way"Soak overnight, drain, then simmer in fresh unsalted water until the skins slip and the centre is creamy. The stated two hours is honest for old beans; recent stock may be done in 60-90 minutes, and a pressure cooker takes 25-30.
- Blanching the baconPouring boiling water over the diced bacon and draining it pulls out surplus salt and smoke. Nineteenth-century bacon was cured far more heavily than modern supermarket rashers; with mild bacon or pancetta you can skip this, but taste before you add any salt at the seasoning stage.
- "Brown gravy thickened with flour"A quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. In period usage this generally means a brown sauce or roux-thickened meat stock rather than the pan drippings of a Sunday roast. Beef stock whisked into a spoonful of flour cooked in the bacon fat gives much the same result.
- StewpanA saucepan with a lid, used on the hob throughout. Nothing here goes into the oven.
- The onionMinced raw onion added with the gravy has only fifteen minutes to soften, which can leave it sharp. Sweating it in the bacon fat before the flour goes in gives a softer, sweeter result, though it departs from the written order.
- Timing at the endThe final quarter hour is for the beans to take up the sauce, not to cook them. If they still resist at that point they were underdone and will stay so. Add a splash of the bean cooking water if the pan tightens up.
- ServingFour as a vegetable dish alongside mutton or beef, closer to two as a supper in its own right. Chopped parsley at the end is in keeping.
Haricots reached English kitchens as a French vegetable and kept the French name; the name of the unrelated mutton stew called a haricot is generally traced to the old verb harigoter, to cut up, while the bean's name is a separate and itself disputed borrowing that came to be assimilated to it, a coincidence that has confused readers of Victorian cookbooks ever since. Dried beans stewed with a piece of salt pork or bacon is the common ancestor of everything from cassoulet to Boston baked beans, and the method here is to blanch the bacon, brown it, and build a gravy in the fat. Cassell's quotes the cost at fourpence a quart, which is the real point of the entry: in a dictionary aimed at middle-class households running on a budget, this was filling protein at a fraction of the price of a joint, and knowing how to treat pulses well was considered a basic competence rather than a specialty.