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Haricot Beans, with Onions
Wash a pint of beans in two or three waters (pick out any discoloured ones that there may be) and leave them to soak in plenty of cold water until the next day. Drain them, and boil them in fresh water until they are tender but unbroken. Drain them once more, and put them on a dish in the oven to keep warm. Take three ounces of onions, which have been three-parts boiled, chop them small, and fry in two ounces of butter, and whilst frying, mix with them the boiled beans. Stir them about with a fork, and moisten with a quarter of a pint of good brown gravy rather highly seasoned. This is an excellent accompaniment to roast meat. Time, an hour and a half to boil the beans. Probable cost, 4d. per quart. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain Victorian side dish that hangs on two things: beans cooked to the point of tenderness without collapsing, and a gravy with enough backbone to season the whole pan. Both are easy to get right once the archaic measures are translated.
- A pint of beansThis is a dry volume measure, not a weight: an imperial pint of dried haricots comes to roughly 1 lb (about 450 g), which will swell to well over 2 lb cooked. That is a generous quantity for four or five as a side, as the recipe claims.
- Which bean"Haricot" here means the small white dried bean sold today as navy or cannellini, not the green french bean. Older stock takes far longer to soften, so buy beans that have not been sitting in a warehouse for years.
- The soak and the boilOvernight in plenty of cold water is still the right approach. The stated hour and a half is a fair average, but modern beans can be tender in 45 minutes or take well over two hours; test rather than time. Keep the water at a bare simmer, since a hard rolling boil is what breaks the skins.
- Salt and acidThe original salts nothing until the gravy stage, which is sound. Adding acidic ingredients to the cooking water slows softening noticeably; salt itself is fine and can go in partway through if you want the beans seasoned through.
- Three-parts boiled onionsThree ounces is about one small onion. Parboiling it for a few minutes before chopping and frying takes the raw bite out and stops the pieces catching in the butter while the beans warm through. Do not skip it and simply fry longer, or the onion will brown rather than soften.
- "Good brown gravy"A quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a cup. In a Victorian kitchen this usually meant a reduced meat stock thickened with browned flour and butter; a well-made beef or veal stock reduced until it coats a spoon does the job. Something too thin will leave the beans watery.
- Keeping warm in the ovenSome ranges of the period had a warming compartment. Use a very low oven, 200-250F, covered, and only for the few minutes it takes to fry the onion, or the beans dry out and wrinkle.
- ServingIntended as an accompaniment to roast meat, in the same slot a modern table gives potatoes. Finishing with chopped parsley and a grind of pepper is entirely in keeping.
Dried haricots were cheap, and Cassell's notes the price approvingly: fourpence a quart, against several times that for meat. The name comes through French, where *haricot* attached itself to the New World bean sometime after its arrival in Europe in the sixteenth century; it is often said to derive from the older French *haricot* meaning a meat stew, though the connection is disputed and may be coincidental.