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Salad of String Beans
Trim one pint of very young beans, put them in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil thirty minutes. When done, drain and throw them into cold water until very cold, then dry them with a soft towel, cut each bean in four pieces lengthwise, arrange them neatly on a salad dish, cover them with French dressing, let stand one hour, and serve.
A cold marinated bean salad that needs only two changes to work today: a much shorter boil and a clear idea of what "French dressing" meant in the period.
- The boiling timeThirty minutes will turn young beans to olive-drab mush. Boil them 4 to 6 minutes in well-salted water, until the raw squeak is gone but the bean still snaps.
- Why the original says thirtyLate-19th-century garden beans were generally coarser and stringier than modern cultivars, and long boiling of vegetables was the norm in period cookbooks. The instruction likely reflects the vegetable and the convention of the day rather than the ideal.
- A pint of beansBeans were commonly measured by volume. A pint of trimmed young beans is roughly half a pound, enough for two or three small salad portions.
- Trimming"Trim" here includes pulling the string down the seam, the step that gave the vegetable its name. Nearly all beans sold now are stringless, so topping them is sufficient.
- The cold waterPlunging into cold water is the shock that fixes the green colour and stops the cooking. Use ice water, and drain and dry thoroughly, or the dressing will slide off.
- French dressingIn a book of this vintage this means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to a temporary emulsion, in the region of three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name.
- Cutting lengthwiseQuartering each bean the long way is frenching, done so the strips take dressing along their cut faces. A sharp knife and patience; the beans must be cold and dry first.
- The standing hourAn hour in dressing is a marinade, not a rest. Keep it cool, and expect the acid to dull the green somewhat by the end, which is the trade for flavour.
Titles like Hot Weather Dishes belong to a genre of small summer cookbooks that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s, when a coal or wood range made July cooking genuinely punishing and the advice was to boil briefly in the morning and serve cold at night. A salad of string beans fits that programme exactly: the stove is lit once, the dish improves while it sits, and nothing needs reheating. The bean itself is a New World plant, but the treatment is French — beans blanched, refreshed, cut fine and dressed with oil and vinegar — and American cookery writers of the period are often said to have looked to French salad technique as a mark of refinement. The name "string bean" records a trait rather than a variety; stringless types were being developed and promoted in the same decades, and within a generation the trimming step this recipe assumes had quietly become optional.