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WHITE KIDNEY BEANS, PUREE OF (another way)
New white beans should be used for making a puree. If fresh, put them into boiling water; if dry, into cold water, adding a little butter in either case, to make the skin more mellow. When the beans are done enough, add a handful of salt to season them. Fry in a little butter a few slices of onions. When they are soft, sprinkle them with half a spoonful of flour; moisten with consomme, and season with a little pepper and salt; skim off the grease. When the flour is done, mix it well with the beans, let them boil a quarter of an hour, and squeeze them well before rubbing them through a tamis. Let the puree be rather limpid, as it is liable to thicken when on the fire. A short time before serving mix a small piece of butter with the puree.
A classic French-style vegetable puree, written for a kitchen with a stockpot always going and a drum sieve on the wall. Nothing here is difficult; the vocabulary is the obstacle.
- The hinge: keep it looseThe instruction to leave the puree "rather limpid" is the one that matters. Starch from the beans and the flour keeps setting up as it sits over heat, so a puree that looks correct in the pan will be stiff paste by the time it reaches the table. Thin it with stock until it is slightly looser than you want to serve it.
- "New white beans"Most likely new-crop beans; the recipe itself covers both fresh and dried. Fresh shelled summer beans (flageolets, coco blancs, fresh cannellini) need only 20 to 30 minutes. Dried cannellini, navy or Great Northern work too; allow 1 to 1.5 hours of simmering, or 45 minutes after an overnight soak.
- ConsommeRead this as good unsalted or lightly salted stock, chicken or veal. Consomme proper is a clarified stock, and the clarification does nothing for you here since the whole thing is going through a sieve anyway.
- A tamisA tamis is a drum sieve - a fine mesh stretched in a hoop, worked with a wooden mushroom. A food mill on the fine plate gives the same silky result with a fraction of the labour. A blender or stick blender is faster still but will not remove the skins, so pass it through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the texture the original intends.
- "A handful of salt"Written for a large stockpot of beans. Salt to taste instead. The old belief that early salting toughens bean skins is widely doubted now, and salting the water from the start appears to season the beans through without harm -- though note the recipe itself waits until the beans are cooked.
- "Half a spoonful of flour"The recipe gives no weight of beans, so any conversion is guesswork: for about a pound of beans read roughly a teaspoon to a scant tablespoon. It is there to bind the onion and stock into a small velvety sauce, so keep it modest and cook the raw flour taste out before it meets the beans.
- Skimming"Skim off the grease" assumes a stock with fat on it. With modern degreased or boxed stock there will be little to skim; the final butter is what supplies the richness.
- Yield and serviceA pound of dried beans makes enough puree for six as a side dish, or four if let down further with stock and served as a soup. It sits well under roast lamb, mutton or duck.
Purees of this kind belong to the grammar of nineteenth-century French cookery rather than to any one dish: a vegetable cooked soft, bound with a small flour-thickened sauce, forced through a tamis and finished with raw butter a short time before serving. The lesson generalises - learn it with white beans and you can repeat it with lentils, peas, turnips or chestnuts. The white haricot itself came to European kitchens from the Americas and by the 1800s was thoroughly naturalised in France, where the distinction between fresh shelled beans in late summer and dried ones through the winter, made in the first sentence here, governed how a cook approached them. The final piece of butter, stirred in only at the last moment so that it enriches without breaking, is the signature of the method and the reason the dish tastes of more than beans.