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White Kidney Beans, Puree Of
The beans, which must be boiled beforehand, are to be mixed with the following preparation. Chop some onions, fry them lightly in a little butter, put a little flour to fry in the butter, and when done moisten with a spoonful or two of broth. Let the onions be thoroughly done. Next let the beans heat in the sauce till quite hot, season well, without pepper, and strain through a tamis. Reduce the puree over a brisk fire, skim off the white scum, and before serving refine the puree with a bit of very fresh butter and two spoonfuls of thick cream. This dish is to be garnished with fried crusts of bread all round. The same method is used to make the soup a la puree d'haricot, only put some strong consomme in it, and keep the puree quite clear. Serve with the soup some crumb of bread cut in small squares and fried brown in butter.
A French-style bean purée that doubles as the base for a soup, written for a kitchen that assumed you already had cooked beans and a pot of broth on hand. Quantities are left to the cook, so work backwards from how many you are feeding.
- QuantitiesNone are given. About 1 lb dried white beans (cannellini, haricot or navy) cooks up to roughly 6 cups and will purée down to six servings; for the soup version, thin with 3-4 cups consommé. One onion, 1 oz butter and a scant tablespoon of flour is the right scale for that amount.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of woven cloth or fine mesh. A food mill or a blender gets you most of the way, but pushing the purée through a fine sieve afterwards is what makes the texture, since bean skins do not break down in a blender.
- Season well, without pepperThe omission is probably deliberate: black pepper would speckle a white puree. Salt generously, and use white pepper if you want the heat without the flecks.
- Cook the onions right throughThe instruction to let the onions be "thoroughly done" is the hinge. Undercooked onion in a puree reads as raw and sharp, and no amount of sieving hides it. In the original the onions are only lightly fried before the flour goes in, and are cooked through after the broth is added.
- The roux and the broth"A spoonful or two of broth" is only enough to loosen the flour into a thick paste; the beans supply the rest of the liquid. Let the flour cook a minute or two in the butter so the sauce does not taste pasty.
- Reducing and skimmingA brisk fire means high heat, and the white scum is starch and protein rising to the surface. Skim it or the finished purée looks cloudy and tastes faintly chalky. Stir often at this stage, since a thick bean purée scorches quickly.
- The finishAdd the butter and cream off the heat, stirring in the butter in small pieces. Boiling after this point splits the enrichment and undoes the point of it.
- GarnishFried bread crusts around the rim for the purée, small croutons fried brown in butter for the soup. Fry them just before serving; they go soft within minutes of hitting the liquid.
What this entry amounts to is a demonstration of purée as a method, applied to a cheap ingredient. The pattern here — vegetable cooked soft, bound with a butter-and-flour base, sieved, reduced, then finished with butter and cream — is the standard French purée of the nineteenth-century professional kitchen, and the note that the same preparation becomes soupe à la purée d'haricots with the addition of consommé shows how thriftily those kitchens worked. The dried haricot itself came to Europe from the Americas and by the Victorian period was a staple of both the French bourgeois table and the English economical cook, valued because it kept well in the dry store. The tamis, a cloth-bottomed drum sieve, was standard equipment, and the recipe's insistence on straining and skimming shows how much care went into achieving a smooth result.