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Windsor, or Broad Beans
These beans are great favourites with many persons, but they are not good unless they are young and freshly gathered. They are in season in July and August. To boil them, first shell them, then put them into slightly-salted and fast-boiling water. When tender, drain them, dish them quickly, and serve with parsley sauce. They are the usual accompaniment to boiled bacon. They should be boiled separately. Two or three recipes for dressing these beans are given under BEANS, BROAD, OR WINDSOR.
A short entry that assumes you already know how to make parsley sauce and boil a joint of bacon. The instructions hold up; only the timings and the state of the beans need spelling out.
- Freshness is the whole recipeCassell is right that broad beans are worthless once they age: the sugars turn to starch and the skins toughen within a day or two of picking. Frozen podded beans are a better buy than tired fresh ones, and need only three to four minutes.
- Cooking time"When tender" means about 3-5 minutes for small young beans, up to 8 for larger ones. Beyond that they go grey and mealy. Taste one rather than watching the clock.
- Double-poddingNot mentioned here, but if the beans are past their first youth, slip the individual beans out of their grey skins after boiling. It is tedious and it transforms the dish.
- Salting the water"slightly-salted" is all that is wanted; a teaspoon or so per litre is enough.
- Boiled separatelyMost likely a direction not to cook the beans in the bacon pot; home-cured bacon of the period was heavily salted and its liquor would overwhelm them.
- Parsley sauceThe entry gives no recipe; a plain white roux sauce (butter, flour, milk) with a good handful of chopped parsley stirred in off the heat suits it. Some of the bean cooking water can replace part of the milk.
- QuantityBroad beans in the pod yield roughly a quarter to a third of their weight shelled, so allow around 1 lb of pods per person as a side dish.
"Windsor" was the name of a large-seeded garden strain of Vicia faba long familiar to English gardeners, which is why Cassell's treats the two names as interchangeable. The broad bean is one of the oldest cultivated legumes in Europe and was a staple of the English kitchen garden long before the French and runner beans arrived from the Americas; by the time this dictionary was compiled it was still a summer favourite, its short July-and-August season duly noted. The pairing with boiled bacon and parsley sauce is a fixture of English cookery of the period, and the reminder that the beans must be boiled apart from the meat is a small clue to how salty home-cured bacon then was.