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Haricot Beans, with Tomato Sauce
Soak the beans for twelve hours, then put them into a saucepan with enough water to cover, an onion, a piece of celery, a turnip, an ounce of butter; add pepper and salt to taste. Boil slowly till soft, then take out the vegetables, drain the beans quickly, pile them high on a dish, and pour over them some thick tomato sauce. Garnish round with croutons.
A plain vegetable dish from the era when dried pulses were pantry staples rather than a specialty item. The instructions are sound; only the quantities and a couple of timings need translating.
- QuantitiesNo amount of beans is given. Half a pound (about 1 cup) of dried haricots soaks up to roughly 3 cups cooked and serves four as a side, two as a main with the croutons.
- What haricot beans areIn British usage these are the small white beans sold today as navy beans; the larger cannellini will also do. Flageolets are also acceptable and hold their shape better.
- Salt in the cooking waterThe recipe salts at the start, which older cooks debated endlessly. Salting from the beginning is fine and seasons the beans through; what genuinely toughens skins is hard water or beans more than a year old.
- Soaking timeTwelve hours is generous. Eight is plenty, and a long soak in a warm kitchen can start to sour or ferment the beans — soak in the refrigerator if leaving them overnight.
- "Boil slowly till soft"Means a bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which breaks the skins. Expect 45 minutes to 1½ hours depending on the age of the beans. Test three or four, not one.
- The aromaticsOnion, celery and turnip go in whole or in large pieces so they can be lifted out. They are there to flavour the cooking liquid, not to be eaten, and the turnip in particular will be spent.
- Drain quicklyThe instruction matters. Beans left sitting in hot water keep cooking and go to mush; drain and dress them at once while still hot so they absorb the sauce.
- Thick tomato saucePeriod tomato sauces were often a reduced, sieved pur closer to a coating sauce than a pasta sauce. Reduce a plain tomato sauce until it mounds on a spoon rather than running off the beans.
- CroûtonsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter or clarified butter, arranged around the rim. Add them at the table; sitting on wet beans they go soft within minutes.
Dried haricots were the workhorse pulse of nineteenth-century European cookery, cheap, storable and filling. The name is generally traced to the French haricot, long associated with the slow-cooked mutton stew haricot de mouton, though the etymological link between the bean and the stew is disputed and may be coincidental. Serving them piled high and masked with a sauce, with fried bread points around the edge, is a piece of pure late-Victorian presentation: a humble ingredient given the shape and garnish of a made dish, which is exactly the sort of economy the household manuals of the period were trying to teach.