Home › The Principles of Cookery › WHITE KIDNEY BEANS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
WHITE KIDNEY BEANS (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
White beans, when fresh, must be put into boiling water; but if dry, they must be soaked for an hour in cold water before being boiled. Then boil them in cold water, and replenish with cold water also, which makes the rind or coat tender. White beans must be well done before being dressed a la maitre d'hotel, which is done as follows. Put in a stewpan a quarter of a pound of fresh butter, a little parsley chopped very fine, and some pepper and salt, over which lay the beans well drained. Keep moving the stewpan, without using a spoon (for fear of breaking the beans). Then squeeze in the juice of half a lemon, and serve quite hot.
A plain French treatment of white beans that survives unchanged in modern cooking, though the soaking instruction is far too brief and the bean quantity is never given.
- The soakAn hour in cold water will not rehydrate dried haricots. Give them 8 hours or overnight, or bring them to the boil, hold for two minutes and leave covered for an hour.
- Cook them hard, not gentlyDried white kidney beans must reach and hold a rolling boil, not merely steep at a low simmer. The lectin they contain is destroyed by boiling, and a slow-cooker temperature is not enough on its own.
- Cold water, and topping up with coldThe instruction is worth keeping. The recipe's own reason is that cold water makes the coat tender; topping up with cold rather than hot is also traditionally said to keep the skins from splitting before the interiors are done.
- What the beans are"White kidney bean" here covers cannellini and the flat white haricot. "Fresh" means shelled from the green pod at the end of summer, the French haricots frais; these usually need 20-30 minutes, dried beans an hour and a half or more depending on their age.
- SaltSalt goes in at the dressing stage here, which is fine. Modern testing suggests salting the cooking water does no harm to the skins either, so add a teaspoon per litre if you prefer seasoned beans.
- QuantitiesA quarter pound of butter is 115 g, generous unless you are cooking a large amount. For 1 lb (450 g) of dried beans, or roughly 2 lb of fresh shelled beans, 60-85 g of butter is ample; that serves six to eight as a side.
- Shake, do not stirThe hinge of the dish. Move the pan in a swirling motion so the butter emulsifies with the water still clinging to the beans; a spoon breaks them into mush. Take the pan off direct heat once the butter is melted or it will split.
- Lemon lastAdd the juice off the heat and serve immediately. Acid added early tightens the skins, and the sauce will separate if held warm for long.
A la maitre d'hotel is one of the simplest French finishing formulas: butter worked with chopped parsley, salt, pepper and lemon juice, its name often said to derive from the household steward who might dress a dish at table rather than in the kitchen. It appears on everything from grilled steak to boiled potatoes to fish, and its presence on a plate of haricots is a mark of how thoroughly French bourgeois practice had been absorbed. Dried white beans were cheap, filling and available all winter, and treating them with butter and parsley rather than bacon and stock moved them from cottage food toward the dinner-table vegetable course. The recipe reads as much as a lesson in method - how to soak, how to boil, how to toss without breaking - as a recipe in its own right.