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String or Butter Beans
Break the blossom end of the bean and pull it back to remove the string. Then pare a thin strip from the other end of the pod. In this way only are you sure that every string is removed. Cut the beans into pieces an inch long, and lay them in clear, cold water for thirty minutes. Drain, put them into a saucepan, cover with boiling water and boil one hour, adding one teaspoonful of salt when they are half done. When done, drain; stir into them one tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper to taste. A half pound of salt pork or ham may be boiled with the beans to give them flavor.
A straightforward late-nineteenth-century vegetable treatment, but the timing belongs to a different bean than the one you will buy today.
- The hour of boilingNineteenth-century pole beans had tougher, more fibrous pods than today's, and long boiling was in any case the general practice of the period for vegetables. Modern bush and wax beans are tender in 5 to 10 minutes of boiling, or 4 to 5 minutes if you want them squeaky; an hour reduces them to olive-drab mush.
- StringingThe blossom-end-and-pull method described here is sound, but almost all beans sold now are stringless varieties and need only their stem ends snapped off. If you are working with an heirloom or an overgrown garden bean, the technique still applies.
- "Butter beans"Here the name most likely means a yellow wax bean, eaten pod and all, rather than the shelled lima that the term signifies in the American South; the stringing instructions and the whole-pod cooking point that way. Treat wax and green beans identically.
- The cold-water soakThirty minutes in cold water crisps limp beans and was useful when produce reached the kitchen a day or two after picking. With fresh beans it is optional; skip it and lose nothing.
- SaltingAdding the teaspoon of salt partway through is unnecessary fussiness. Salt the water from the start, about a tablespoon per quart, which seasons the beans throughout as they cook.
- Salt pork or hamA half pound simmered with the beans will do little in the short cooking time modern beans require. To get that flavor, render diced salt pork or bacon separately and toss the drained beans in the fat instead of the butter.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon a pound of beans for four as a side dish, with the tablespoon of butter about right for that amount.
Books of "hot weather dishes" appear to have circulated in the 1880s and 1890s, aimed at households where the summer kitchen meant a coal range in an unventilated room. String beans were among the most reliable summer crops in American gardens and markets, and the care taken here over removing the strings reflects a real problem: the pole varieties then common, such as Kentucky Wonder, had a fibrous seam along each side of the pod that made careless preparation unpleasant to eat. Stringless bush varieties were introduced commercially in the 1890s and gradually made the whole operation unnecessary, though the term "string beans" remains in common American use. The long boil and the piece of salt pork are the older Anglo-American pattern for vegetables, well established before the shorter, crisper cooking urged by dietary reformers in the early twentieth century took hold.