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String Beans
1 lb. string beans 1 oz. fat salt pork 1 teaspoon salt Wash, remove the strings from the beans, then snap or cut with a knife into half inch pieces. If wilted let them stand in cold water an hour before cooking. Cook in boiling water with the salt pork, uncovered, from one to two hours. Add salt the last half hour of cooking. When done the water should be nearly cooked away. Butter may be substituted for the salt pork.
A plain boiled bean, in the style that assumed a stringy field-grown pod and a cook who wanted it soft. The one thing to reconsider is the clock.
- The cooking timeOne to two hours will reduce modern beans to olive-drab threads. Today's stringless varieties are tender in 5-8 minutes of boiling, or 10-12 if you want them fully soft rather than crisp. The long boil in the original was aimed at tough, mature pods with a fibrous seam.
- Removing the stringsMost beans sold now are bred stringless, so snapping off the stem end is all that is needed. If a string does pull away when you snap the tip, keep pulling it down the seam.
- Fat salt porkAn ounce is a piece about the size of a one-inch cube. Salt pork is still sold, usually near the bacon; unsmoked pork belly or a slice of thick bacon does the same job, which is to leave fat and savour in the water. Butter, as the recipe says, works and is faster.
- Salt at the endThe recipe holds the salt back until the last half hour, presumably a habit of the long-boil method. With a short cook, salt the water at the start — it seasons the beans through and does nothing to toughen them.
- "The water should be nearly cooked away"That is the finish this recipe wants: the beans sit in a spoonful of salty pork fat rather than being drained. If you shorten the cooking, use only an inch or two of water and let it boil down at the end, or drain and toss the beans with the rendered fat.
- Wilted beansThe hour in cold water is sound and still works. Limp beans rehydrate and stiffen noticeably; 20-30 minutes is usually enough.
- YieldOne pound serves three to four as a side dish.
Boiling green beans with a scrap of salt pork is one of the oldest American vegetable habits, and it survives most visibly in Southern cooking, where the technique produces what are still called long-cooked beans. The method made sense for the beans of the period: garden and market varieties before the mid-twentieth century had a tough fibrous string along the seam and a leathery pod wall, and an hour or more of simmering was what turned them edible. Breeders steadily selected the string out, and stringless beans are said to have been promoted commercially well before this book appeared, though the older types persisted in home gardens for decades. The Gold Medal book includes a vegetable chapter of exactly this kind: unfussy, economical entries that assume salt pork in the pantry and no particular interest in the vegetable staying green.