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String Beans with Gravy
Dissolve four ounces of butter in a pan, and stir into it 3 ounces of flour till it becomes brown and quite smooth. Mix a little gravy and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Take any quantity of this; souse and simmer the beans, previously boiled, for twenty minutes. Allow 1 quart, for six or seven persons.
The method applied to string beans can also be applied to butter beans and lima beans.
This is a brown-roux sauce poured over already-cooked beans, written in the shorthand of a period when every cook knew how to build a roux by eye. The proportions of fat to flour are given; the liquid is not.
- The roux is the hingeFour ounces of butter (1 stick) to three ounces of flour (about 2/3 cup) must be cooked slowly until it is genuinely nut-brown and smooth, not merely blond. Rushing this over high heat scorches the flour and turns the sauce bitter rather than nutty.
- How much liquidThe original says only "a little gravy." A roux of this size will carry roughly 3 to 4 cups of stock or meat gravy for a pourable sauce; add it warm, a ladle at a time, whisking smooth before the next addition. Browned flour thickens less than pale flour, so judge by consistency rather than by ratio.
- "Souse" hereIn this context it means to drench or plunge the beans into the sauce, not to pickle them. The beans go into the pan of sauce, not the other way round.
- Twenty minutes is too longThe beans have already been boiled. Simmering them a further twenty minutes in the sauce leaves them olive-grey and limp. Two to four minutes is enough to heat them through and let them take up the gravy; if you want the older, softer texture, boil them less at the first stage.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained hand, no more than a quarter teaspoon for this quantity of sauce. Nutmeg turns up often with butter-and-flour sauces in cookery of this period, and it dominates quickly.
- YieldThe original's "Allow 1 quart" is ambiguous as to whether it means beans or finished dish; read as beans, a quart of trimmed string beans is roughly a pound, serving six or seven as a side dish. The quantity of sauce described is generous for that amount; make half if you want the beans merely coated.
- Butter beans and lima beansThese are shell beans, not pods, and want longer initial cooking than string beans. Cook them until tender on their own terms before they meet the sauce.