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Kidney Beans, White, Fricasseed
Take one pint of either fresh or dry white kidney beans. Remove the skins; and in order to do this, the beans, if dry, must be soaked in water for ten or twelve hours, and afterwards boiled until tender, when the skins will slip off. If fresh, they must be put into scalding water for a minute, and the skins peeled off. Put the beans into a saucepan, add as much good veal stock as will cover them, with half a tea-spoonful of salt, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of pepper, the eighth part of a nutmeg, grated, a large bunch of parsley, a small one of thyme, and a piece of fresh butter, rolled in flour. Simmer gently for fifteen minutes; then take out the herbs, and put into the sauce a glass of sherry. Let it boil, then draw it from the fire a minute to cool, and stir into it the yolks of two eggs, mixed with half a cupful of thick cream, and the strained juice of half a lemon. Serve on a hot dish, and garnish with French beans, pickled. Time, half an hour to stew the beans after the skins have been taken off. Probable cost, 2d. or 3d. per pint. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian fricassee in the strict sense: not a fry, but a white stew finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Everything hinges on the last minute.
- Do not let the liaison boilOnce the yolks and cream go in, the sauce must be kept below a simmer or the eggs will scramble and the sauce will break. The instruction to draw the pan from the fire and let it cool a minute before stirring them in is the whole technique, not a nicety.
- The beansWhite kidney beans here means what is now sold as cannellini, or any large white haricot. One pint dry is about 2 cups, which cooks up to roughly 5 cups; the recipe's yield of three or four is about right as a side dish.
- Skinning is optional but changes the dishSlipping the skins off after cooking is what gives the old fricassee its smooth, almost creamy body. It is tedious work; skip it and the dish is still good, just coarser. Fresh shell beans blanched a minute do peel easily, as described.
- Butter rolled in flourButter dredged in or worked with flour, in effect a beurre manié, dropped in to thicken as it melts. The recipe gives no quantity; add it in small pieces so it disperses.
- Measures to translateAn eighth of a nutmeg grated is roughly a quarter teaspoon. A glass of sherry in this period is a wine glass, about 2 fl oz; use a dry sherry, not cream. Half a cupful of thick cream means heavy cream.
- Veal stockLight veal stock is rarely on hand now. A mild unsalted chicken stock is the nearest thing; avoid a dark, heavily reduced stock, which will muddy a sauce meant to stay pale.
- The two times do not agreeThe body of the recipe says simmer fifteen minutes; the footer says half an hour to stew the beans after the skins have been taken off. Fifteen minutes is plenty for beans already boiled tender; the reason for the footer's longer time is unclear.
- The garnishPickled French beans means whole slender green beans put up in vinegar. Any good pickled green bean works, and its acidity is deliberate against the rich sauce.
Fricassee in nineteenth-century English cookery books usually means a white stew bound at the end with egg yolks and cream and sharpened with lemon — the same finish often used for fricasseed chicken, rabbit or veal — and its appearance here, applied to a pint of dried beans costing twopence, shows how freely Victorian writers moved a French technique down the price scale. White kidney beans are American in origin, carried into Europe during the sixteenth century and grown widely in Italy and France long before they became ordinary in British kitchens, where they were often called haricots. Cassell's dictionary, apparently compiled with an eye on the account book, habitually prints the probable cost beside the method; a dish that dresses cheap pulses in veal stock, sherry and cream is exactly the kind of economy such readers seem to have been taught to practise without appearing to.