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String Bean Soup
4 cups White Stock I, II, or III 2 quarts string beans 2 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup butter Salt and pepper Cook beans until soft in boiling salted water to cover; drain, and rub through sieve. Add pulp to White Stock, then milk; bind, and season with salt and pepper. Garnish with Fritter Beans.
A turn-of-the-century purée soup built on the standard cream-soup formula: vegetable pulp, stock, milk, and a butter-flour binding. Two decisions matter — how long the beans cook and how the roux is handled.
- "Bind" means a roux"Bind" means thickening with the 1/4 cup butter and 1/4 cup flour; the usual handling is to cook them together for two or three minutes without browning, then whisk in the hot stock and milk. Added dry to hot liquid the flour will lump; added to a cool base it will taste raw.
- Quantity of beansTwo quarts is a volume measure of raw beans, on the order of 2 lb. How much pulp survives the sieve will vary; expect roughly a couple of cups going into the 4 cups stock and 2 cups milk.
- Cook to soft, not to deathThe beans must be tender enough to push through a sieve, which takes longer than modern tender-crisp cooking; figure 15 to 20 minutes or more, and stop as soon as they give way. Longer than that and the soup turns the drab olive colour typical of period vegetable purées.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the standard household method at this date. A blender or food mill does it faster; if you use a blender, still pass the purée through a sieve to catch the fibrous strings.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, when it shivers at the edges. Scalding was originally done to check souring in unpasteurised milk; today its use is simply to keep the hot base from dropping in temperature.
- White Stock I, II, or IIIThese are the numbered veal or chicken stocks given earlier in the book. Any light unsalted chicken or veal stock works; a strongly reduced or heavily salted commercial broth will overwhelm the beans.
- Seasoning and finishSeason after the milk goes in, since the milk mutes salt. Do not boil the soup once the dairy is in — hold it just under a simmer to keep it from curdling or catching on the pan bottom.
- YieldThe liquids alone come to 6 cups before the bean pulp goes in, so expect nearer 7 to 8 cups finished soup, six to eight first-course servings.
This is a textbook example of the Boston Cooking School cream-soup method that dominated American domestic cookery from the 1890s onward: any vegetable, reduced to pulp, extended with a white stock and milk, and thickened with equal measures of butter and flour. The formula appears again and again across the soup chapters of these books — asparagus, celery, corn, pea, string bean — with only the vegetable changing. The instruction to "bind" without further explanation assumes a reader who has already worked through the book's basic sauce lessons. String beans in season came in quantity from the kitchen garden or market, and a purée soup was a practical use for beans grown slightly too large and coarse for serving whole.