Home › Vegetables › Fricasseed Beans
Fricasseed Beans
Take one pint of either fresh or dry white kidney beans. Remove the skins; and in order to do this, the beans, if dry, must be soaked in water for ten or twelve hours, and afterwards boiled until tender, when the skins will slip off. If fresh, they must be put into scalding water for a minute, and the skins peeled off. Put the beans into a saucepan, add as much good veal stock as will cover them, with a teaspoonful of salt, a quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper, the eighth part of a nutmeg, grated, a large bunch of parsley, a small one of thyme, and a piece of fresh butter, rolled in flour. Simmer gently for fifteen minutes; then take out the herbs, and put into the sauce a glass of sherry. Let it boil, then draw it from the fire a minute to cool, and stir into it the yolks of 2 eggs, mixed with half a cupful of thick cream and the strained juice of half a lemon. Serve on a hot dish, and garnish with French beans, pickled. Time, half an hour to stew the beans after the skins have been taken off. Sufficient for three or four persons.
An old-style fricassee applied to beans: the beans are cooked plain, then bound with an egg-and-cream liaison sharpened with lemon and sherry. Everything hinges on the last step.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks, cream and lemon juice go in, keep the pan off direct heat and stir over a very low flame or residual heat only. Above about 180F the yolks curdle and the sauce turns grainy; the recipe's instruction to draw the pan from the fire for a minute first is the whole trick.
- What the beans are"Fresh white kidney beans" means shell beans taken from the pod, which is what cannellini are before drying. If you cannot find them, dried cannellini are the direct substitute; one pint dry is roughly 14 oz, which cooks up to somewhere around 4 to 5 cups.
- Skinning is optionalThe recipe insists on it, and slipping the skins off was probably aimed at a smooth, pale dish. Modern cannellini have thin enough skins that you can skip it without much loss, though the texture will be slightly less silky.
- A glass of sherryThe recipe says only "a glass"; a wineglassful in household books was conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz. Use a dry sherry (fino or amontillado); a cream sherry will push the dish sweet.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: about 1 tablespoon soft butter kneaded with 1 tablespoon flour, dropped into the simmering stock to thicken it. Add it in small pieces so it disperses rather than lumping.
- Nutmeg and herbsAn eighth of a whole nutmeg, grated, comes to roughly 1/4 to 1/3 teaspoon. The parsley and thyme go in as tied bunches and are lifted out whole before the sauce is finished, so no chopping is needed.
- StockVeal stock gives the neutral, gelatinous body this sauce wants. A light chicken stock is the closest substitute; a dark beef stock will overwhelm the beans and muddy the color.
- TimingsThe fifteen-minute simmer applies to already-tender beans finishing in the stock. Dried beans need their own 45 to 90 minutes of cooking beforehand, depending on age.
- Yield and garnishThree to four persons. The pickled French beans are pickled green beans; the recipe does not say how they are served, only that they garnish the dish.
Fricassee in nineteenth-century English cookery meant a white dish finished with an egg-yolk-and-cream binding, usually chicken or veal. White kidney beans were a kitchen-garden staple eaten both green in the pod and as shell beans. The lemon juice and sherry do the same work here that they do in a veal fricassee of the period: lifting a sauce that is otherwise all butter, stock and cream.