Alice Brady
CUT BEANS, DUTCH STYLE
Strip the beans and cut into strips. Place in a sauté pan and add to one pound of beans two ounces of butter, a pinch of salt and sugar and two tablespoonfuls of water. Cover tightly with the lid and stew till tender.
Yours truly, Alue Brady
A butter-braise rather than a boil: the whole method rests on cooking the beans in almost no liquid under a tight lid, so the pan and the heat matter more than the ingredient list.
- The hinge: two tablespoons of waterThat is all the liquid there is, so the lid must seal and the heat must stay low. If steam escapes the pan scorches within minutes; check once at about the halfway point and add a spoonful of water only if the bottom is dry.
- "Strip the beans"This means stringing them — pulling the fibrous seam from each side of a runner or pole bean. Modern stringless green beans need only their stem ends trimmed.
- Cut into stripsMost likely lengthwise, each bean sliced into two or three long ribbons, as in "frenched" beans. Cut this way they cook faster and take up butter better than crosswise pieces.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick, to one pound of beans. It is meant to emulsify with the bean juices into a glaze, so do not drain the pan at the end.
- A sauté panIn 1916 this is a wide, straight-sided pan with a lid. Use the widest lidded pan you have so the beans sit in one layer rather than steaming in a heap.
- "Stew till tender"For thick strips of old-fashioned runner beans that could be 20 to 25 minutes. Slender modern green beans cut lengthwise are done in 8 to 12 minutes; taste rather than time them, since the point here is soft and buttery, not squeaky.
- The pinch of sugarNot enough to sweeten the dish; it is there to round the flavour, and can be left out.
- YieldA pound of beans serves three to four as a side dish.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries collected recipes solicited from stage and screen performers of the mid-1910s, and the contributions run exactly as this one does: short, unfussy, signed off like a piece of fan correspondence. Alice Brady had come to film from the stage, and her career ran on to an Academy Award in the 1930s; her offering here is a plain vegetable dish rather than anything showy — a reminder that these books traded on the name at the bottom, not the ambition of the cooking. The method itself is standard northern European home practice, cooking vegetables in their own juices with butter, and "Dutch style" here most likely refers to the cut and the closed-pan braise rather than to any particular regional dish. The signature appears as "Alue Brady," most likely a misreading of the handwritten original.