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Some Kitchen Kinks: Green
Green or String Beans.-Formerly it was difficult to find the slender, stringless green beans, but to-day the progressive market gardeners make a point of raising beans of this kind.
Unfortunately, not all market gardeners and farmers are progressive, and many still raise a coarse, fibrous bean that is a disappointment to the consumer. In the very early stage of the pod almost any kind of bean will be good, if properly cooked, but all except the stringless kind must have their strings carefully removed. The pods should be gathered while small and tender.
If for any reason they become wilted, they must be made crisp and fresh by being soaked in cold water. The beans that are brought from the South in cold weather are usually more or less wilted. They should be freed from strings, cut up, and soaked at least twelve hours in cold water. They will then cook like fresh beans.
To Blanch Green Beans. - Green beans should always be blanched. To do this drain them from the cold water and put them into water that is boiling rapidly, allowing a teaspoonful of salt to two quarts of water. Boil rapidly, with the cover partially off the saucepan, for twenty minutes. Turn into a colander and let cold water run upon them. They are now ready to be finished in any manner you like. The blanching can be done in the morning while the fire APPENDIX is good and the beans be finished for dinner at the proper time.
Green Beans, Plain. 1 quart beans. ½ pint water. 1 generous tablespoonful butter. 1 level teaspoonful salt.
String the beans if necessary and cut them into two-inch lengths.
Blanch them as directed. Drain and put in the saucepan with the water, salt, and butter. Cook for ten minutes over a hot fire, turning the contents of the saucepan from time to time. Serve very hot. If the beans are not tender it may take fifteen minutes to cook them, but under all circumstances be careful not to overcook, as this ruins the flavor. If overcooked, green beans become yellow or brown.
Green Beans Boiled with Pork.- Boil about a quarter of a pound of pork for five hours. Have the beans free from strings and cut about 2 inches long. Cook them with the pork until tender (about half an hour).
Green Beans with Pork (French Method). 1 quart boiled beans. 2 ounces pork. 1 pint hot water. 1 teaspoonful flour.
Cut the pork into small dice and put in the stewpan. Cook slowly for twenty minutes, then add the water.
Mix the flour with a few spoonfuls of cold water; stir into the pork and water. Place the stewpan where the contents will cook slowly for an hour.
A page of instructions for a vegetable that has changed more than almost anything else in the produce aisle: the strings are gone, and with them most of the reason for the long cooking described here.
- The blanching time is the thing to ignoreTwenty minutes at a rolling boil will take modern stringless beans past tender to olive-drab and limp. Two to four minutes in heavily salted boiling water, then straight into ice water, gets you the same make-ahead convenience the author wanted without destroying the bean. The finishing steps that follow (ten to fifteen minutes over a hot fire, half an hour with pork) assume beans that arrived tough and fibrous.
- Quart of beansBeans were sold and measured by volume, as here. A quart of two-inch cut green beans is roughly a pound, serving about four as a side dish.
- 1½ pint waterThree cups. It is a great deal of liquid for a pound of beans and reflects the expectation that they will need real stewing; with today's beans a few tablespoons of water with the butter is enough to glaze them.
- Salt for blanchingA teaspoon to two quarts is light by current practice; many modern cooks use a tablespoon or more per two quarts so the beans season from the outside in.
- "A hot fire" and "where the contents will cook slowly"On a coal or wood range, cooking speed was controlled by where you set the pan. Read "hot fire" as high heat and the slow position as a bare simmer over low heat.
- The porkBoth pork versions most likely mean salt pork or fat bacon rather than fresh pork loin, though the recipe does not say; long boiling would soften the cure and render the fat. Unsmoked salt pork or a piece of pancetta is the nearest thing on sale today, and an hour of simmering will generally do.
- The French method is a sauce, not a cooking methodThe pork, water and teaspoon of flour make a thin, fatty liaison that the already-boiled beans are held in. If you simmer it a full hour as written, add the beans only in the last few minutes.
- Reviving wilted beansThe twelve-hour cold-water soak for beans shipped up from the South still works on tired supermarket beans, though an hour is usually enough. The recipe has you string and cut the beans before they go into the water.
- Color as a doneness testThe warning that overcooked beans go yellow or brown matches the chemistry: prolonged heat and acid convert bright chlorophyll to olive pheophytin. The recipe's instruction to boil with the cover only partially on is often explained as letting volatile acids escape and helping hold the green.
This entry catches green beans mid-transformation. Nineteenth-century pole and bush beans had a tough fibrous seam running the length of the pod, and stringing them is often said to have been a standing summer chore for children and kitchen help; the stringless varieties the author praises came out of American seed-trade breeding work in the closing years of the 1800s, and by the time this book was printed they were common enough in market gardens to be expected but not universal. The name "string bean" outlived the string, which is why the pods are also called snap beans and, in French cooking, haricots verts. The reference to beans "brought from the South in cold weather" is worth noticing too: refrigerated rail cars had made out-of-season vegetables available to northern city households, arriving limp after days in transit, and the twelve-hour soak is a housekeeper's remedy for a problem that was arguably far less pressing a generation earlier. The pork versions belong to the older tradition, in which a piece of salt pork commonly stood in for both fat and seasoning in vegetable dishes.