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Pepper and Salt (Nutmeg A tablespoonful)
Nutmeg. A tablespoonful of chopped Parsley parboiled. The juice of half a Lemon.
Pick and string the beans, cutting each bean into three or four strips. Wash them well in cold water, drain them, and put them into a saucepan of boiling water, boil fast till tender. Put them into cold water for a few minutes, dry them in a clean cloth, and put them into a stewpan with the butter, parsley, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemonjuice. When quite hot, serve them with croûtons round.
Haricots panachés à la Maître d'Hôtel.
Ingredients.
Half a pint of Haricot Beans. دو وو
The page has been scrambled in transcription: the method comes first, and the heading and start of the ingredient list for Haricots panachés à la Maître d'Hôtel land at the end. Read it as one dish — beans boiled, dried, and tossed in a parsley-lemon butter.
- What the beans areHaricots here are fresh green beans, cut lengthwise into three or four strips — what a British kitchen of the period called French beans, and what a modern cook would buy as green beans or runner beans. They are not dried haricots, which would never take this treatment. Panachés means variegated or mixed — two kinds of bean served together, commonly green beans with flageolets, sometimes with yellow wax beans.
- The missing butterThe ingredient list is cut off before the butter is given, so the quantity cannot be recovered from the page; a couple of ounces would suit this amount of beans.
- Nutmeg"Nutmeg" with no quantity means a scrape of the grater — a few rasps, no more. The tablespoonful applies to the parsley, not the nutmeg.
- Parboiled parsleyBlanching the chopped parsley for under a minute and squeezing it dry sets the colour and takes off the raw grassy edge. It is worth doing; it is why the finished butter stays bright green rather than turning drab.
- Boil fast, then refreshFast boiling in plenty of well-salted water, uncovered, keeps the beans green. The dip in cold water stops the cooking, and drying in a cloth matters — wet beans will not take the butter, and the sauce breaks into a watery pool.
- Reheating"When quite hot" means gentle heat only, long enough to warm through and coat, perhaps two minutes. Hard heat splits the butter and the lemon juice curdles it out of emulsion.
- CroûtonsThese are small shaped pieces of bread fried in butter or clarified butter, set around the edge of the dish as a border. Cut them into triangles or diamonds and fry them just before serving so they stay crisp.
Maître d'hôtel butter — softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper — is one of the small compound butters codified by the nineteenth-century French kitchen and carried wholesale into British professional cookery, where it dressed grilled steaks, fried fish and boiled vegetables alike. The name is generally traced to the idea of a preparation quick enough for a steward to finish at the sideboard rather than something requiring the sauce cook. Panaché, literally plumed or variegated, describes a dish of two colours; with beans it might mean green beans and yellow together, or green beans with flageolets. The French titling here is the point: the book was teaching an English household, or its cook, to produce and to name dishes in the idiom of the grand hotel dining room, and a plate of green beans becomes a formal course with a border of fried croûtons.