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Haricot (Lima) Beans (a la Maitre d'Hotel)
For the sake of variety haricot beans may, if liked, be cooked as follows: Put 2 quarts of water into a stewpan, with half a teaspoonful of salt. When boiling, throw into it 1 pint of freshly shelled beans, and let them simmer gently until soft. Drain them, and put them into a saucepan with an ounce of fresh butter, a little pepper and salt, a dessertspoonful of scalded and chopped parsley, and a tablespoonful of lemon juice. Shake the saucepan over the fire till they are well mixed, and serve as hot as possible. Time, two hours or more.
A plain butter-and-parsley finish that works on any shelled bean. The one figure to ignore is the cooking time.
- The time is wrong for fresh beansFreshly shelled limas need 20 to 30 minutes at a gentle simmer; young ones less. The "two hours or more" reflects either dried beans or the mealy, fully mature pods of a late-summer garden. Test one at 20 minutes and go by texture, not the clock.
- If you use dried beansSoak overnight, then simmer 1 to 1½ hours until they crush against the roof of the mouth. A pint of dried beans swells to roughly double, so use less than the pint called for here.
- Which bean this isEnglish books of the period used "haricot" loosely, for shelled beans of more than one kind; the parenthetical in the title looks like an editor or compiler reading it as lima. Flageolet, butter beans and cannellini all take this treatment.
- Spoon and weight measuresA dessertspoonful is two teaspoons. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. A pint of shelled beans is about 10 to 12 ounces.
- Scalded parsleyPour boiling water over the parsley, then drain and dry it before chopping. This sets the colour and takes the raw edge off the stems; it is not essential, and fresh chopped parsley works.
- Keep the lemon off the heatAdding the juice once the pan is off the burner keeps the parsley's colour brighter; the recipe as written has you shake it over the fire. Shaking rather than stirring coats the beans without breaking them.
- Salt the water lightlyHalf a teaspoon in two quarts is very little by current practice. Salt more generously — the beans season from the inside as they cook — and hold back the final seasoning until you taste.
- YieldServes three to four as a side dish. It must go to the table hot; butter-dressed beans turn waxy as they cool.
À la maître d'hôtel is one of the simplest formulas in French cooking: butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, named for the head of household service rather than any one chef. It was applied to steaks, potatoes, fish and vegetables alike, and its appearance here — offered explicitly "for the sake of variety" — shows a compiler using a French label to lift a plain boiled vegetable. The bean itself carries a naming muddle: English cookbooks used "haricots" loosely for shelled beans, while American editors glossed them as limas, after the Peruvian port from which the large flat variety is generally said to have reached North America. The parenthesis in the title looks like an editor reconciling a British source with an American pantry.