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WINDSOR BEANS (preserved in tins)
Gather the Windsor beans when they are the size of green peas; put them into tins holding a pint each, with a tea-spoonful of salt, a sprig of green winter savory, and half a gill of water. Let a tinman solder down the covers; then put the tins into a large stewpan. Cover with boiling water, and boil quickly for half an hour. Take them from the fire, and when cold examine them carefully. Solder again any parts that leak, and keep the tins in a cool place. When the beans are to be used, open the tin, and turn its contents, liquor and all, into a saucepan with a sprig of parsley and a pinch of powdered white sugar. When the beans are hot, strain off the liquor, put the vegetables into a tureen with a small piece of butter, and serve. Time to boil the beans in the tins, half an hour.
This is a home-canning procedure for a low-acid vegetable, and it fails on every count by which preserving is now judged. The notes below explain what the ingredients and vessels were, and why the method cannot be used.
- Why it is unsafe: the temperature never gets high enoughBroad beans are a low-acid food, and Clostridium botulinum spores routinely survive boiling water. Thirty minutes in a stewpan of boiling water reaches only 212F, while the spores require sustained 240-250F, achievable only under pressure. A sealed, oxygen-free tin of wet beans held in a cool larder is close to an ideal incubator for the toxin, which is odourless and tasteless.
- Why it is unsafe: the sealThe soldering described would have been a lead-tin solder applied by a tinman, and lead-soldered seams and lids were a source of lead contamination in canned food in the nineteenth century, increasingly recognised as such as the century went on. Resoldering leaks after processing also means reopening a supposedly sterile pack to the air. No part of this closure system has a modern equivalent a domestic cook could reproduce.
- Why it is unsafe: the test for spoilageThe recipe's only check is a visual inspection for leaks. Botulism produces no reliable visible sign in a sealed tin, so a can that passes this inspection tells you nothing. If you want to preserve beans, use a current tested pressure-canning schedule or freeze them.
- Windsor beansThese are broad beans, Vicia faba, the Windsor being the classic large-seeded English garden variety. The instruction to gather them at the size of green peas means very young beans, before the skins toughen. A minority of people of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian descent carry G6PD deficiency and can suffer severe haemolysis from broad beans in any form.
- A gillA gill is a quarter of a pint, so half a gill is two and a half imperial fluid ounces, about 70 ml. The pint tins are Imperial pints, roughly 570 ml.
- Winter savorySatureja montana, a woody perennial with a sharper, more resinous flavour than summer savory. It has long been associated with broad and green beans in English and continental cooking; thyme is the nearest common substitute.
- The serving methodThe finishing step, reheating with parsley and a pinch of sugar, draining, then dressing with butter in a tureen, is sound and applies perfectly well to fresh or frozen young broad beans. A pint of beans serves two or three as a vegetable.
Commercial canning was well established in Britain by the time this dictionary appeared, the preserving of food in sealed tin canisters being generally traced to the patents taken out in London in 1810 following Nicolas Appert's work in France. What is striking here is the assumption that a private household could simply have a tinman solder its garden surplus into pint cans. The science lagged well behind the practice: the role of heat-resistant bacterial spores in low-acid foods was not understood when this method was set down, and it took the food-poisoning outbreaks and laboratory work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to establish that boiling water alone will not sterilise a can of beans. Broad beans themselves are among the oldest cultivated pulses in Europe, eaten green in the pod stage long before the New World bean varieties arrived, and the pairing with savory is old enough that the German name for the herb, Bohnenkraut, means simply bean herb.