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French
Two ounces of Butter.
Croûtons of fried Bread. دو Boil the haricots and French beans as usual until tender. Melt the butter in a saucepan, and sauté both the beans until hot and well mixed. Serve piled lightly on a dish and garnish with the croûtons.
A simple two-bean sauté that depends entirely on the beans being cooked correctly before they meet the butter. Quantities for the beans themselves are not given, so scale to your table.
- What the beans are"Haricots" here means shelled beans -- flageolets or small white haricots, dried and soaked overnight, or fresh shell beans in season. "French beans" are the green pods, what a modern shop sells as green or fine beans. The dish is a deliberate pairing of the two textures.
- QuantitiesThe original gives only the two ounces of butter (about 55g) and the croutons. For four people, reckon on roughly 8 oz of cooked shelled beans and 8 oz of trimmed green beans; the butter is generous for that amount and can be cut back.
- Cook them separatelyDried haricots need 45-90 minutes at a bare simmer depending on age, salted only towards the end. Green beans want 4-6 minutes in heavily salted boiling water. Boiling them together guarantees one is wrong.
- "Until tender" for the green beansCookery books of the period often give French beans a much longer boil than we would now accept, sometimes fifteen minutes or more. Pull them while they still have bite and colour, then refresh in cold water if you are not serving at once.
- The sautéBoth beans are already cooked; the pan is only for heating and coating. Two or three minutes over moderate heat, tossing, is enough. Longer and the butter browns and the green beans slacken.
- CroutonsSmall dice or triangles of white bread fried in clarified butter or oil until pale gold, drained on paper. Fry them before you start the beans -- they must go on at the last moment or they soften.
- SeasoningNone is specified, which is not unusual in books of this kind. Salt, pepper and a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chopped parsley at the end all belong here.
The pairing of shelled haricots with green beans is a standard of French domestic cooking, and the name of this book's section tells you why it is here: British cookery schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries taught "high class" cooking as essentially French cooking, and vegetable dishes were among the first things borrowed. The word haricot itself covers both the dried bean and the fresh pod in French, and English kitchens came to distinguish them awkwardly as "haricots" and "French beans" -- the same plant, Phaseolus vulgaris, taken at two different stages, the latter name often said to record the plant's arrival in Britain by way of France, though that explanation is traditional rather than settled. Fried bread croutons as a garnish for a buttered vegetable were a house style of the period, adding crispness where the dish has none and stretching a small quantity of vegetable into something that could stand as a separate course.