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Boiled String Beans
Only the ends and stalks require to be taken off when the beans are very young, and no mode of cooking can make very old ones eatable. Put them, as they are prepared, into cold water. They are cut, according to taste, lengthwise into thin strips or obliquely into a lozenge form. The strings should be drawn off with the tops and stalks when they are come to their proper growth. Put them into a large saucepan of boiling water, slightly salted; allow the steam to escape, and keep boiling very fast until tender. Time, fifteen minutes if young; twenty to twenty-five minutes if old. Serve with butter or a cream sauce.
A plain boiled bean, written when beans still had strings and cooks still boiled them to collapse. The method holds up; the clock does not.
- Cut the time hardFifteen to twenty-five minutes will leave you with olive-drab, limp beans. Modern varieties are tender in 4 to 6 minutes whole, 3 to 4 minutes if cut into strips or lozenges. Test one at the earliest point and keep testing.
- Strings, or the lack of themAlmost all beans sold now are stringless, so the instruction to draw the string off with the top and stalk is obsolete. Snap off the stem end; the tapered tail can stay on.
- "Obliquely into a lozenge form"That is a diagonal cut, roughly 1 inch, which is still the neatest way to handle a mature bean. Lengthwise thin strips are what a French-cut bean is.
- Why the steam escapesLeaving the pan uncovered is usually explained as letting volatile acids off rather than letting them settle back onto the beans and dull the green; the effect is modest, but combined with a hard, fast boil in plenty of water it helps the beans hold their colour.
- Salt the water properly"Slightly salted" is too timid for a vegetable that will be drained. Use about 1 tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts of water; it seasons the bean and does not slow the cooking.
- Stop the cookingBeans carry on softening in their own heat. Drain them the moment they are done, and if they are not going straight to the table, drop them into ice water and then reheat in the butter.
- The cream sauceThe book does not specify; a thin bechamel is the likely reading: about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and a little nutmeg. Butter alone, with pepper and lemon, is the lighter option.
- QuantityReckon 1 lb of beans for four as a side dish, which needs at least 3 to 4 quarts of water to keep the boil from stalling when they go in.
Boiling in a large volume of hard-boiling salted water, uncovered, is a nineteenth-century vegetable technique that survives in professional kitchens, where a brief version of it is taught as blanching. What changed is the bean itself: the varieties available to a Victorian cook developed a tough fibrous seam along the pod as they matured, and the warning that "no mode of cooking can make very old ones eatable" was practical advice for anyone buying from a market rather than picking daily. Breeding for stringless pods, generally traced to selections made by American seed growers in the later nineteenth century, eventually removed both the string and the need for the long boil that older pods demanded.