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Some Kitchen Kinks: Taste
At the end of this time add the beans and cook half an hour. Taste to see if more salt is required. A tablespoonful of butter added just before serving is a great acquisition to this dish.
Butter beans, the varieties of string beans which are pale yellow in color, may be cooked like the green string beans.
Scarlet Runner Beans. -In Great Britain the scarlet runner beans, which are raised in the United States almost exclusively as an ornamental plant, are highly prized for the table. The tender green pods are "whittled" into small sections (after stringing) and cooked in water until just tender. Like other green vegetables, they lose their color and delicate flavor if overcooked. These beans are at their best seasoned only with butter and salt.
Shelled Kidney Beans. All the varieties of this bean, when gathered while the seeds are still tender, may be cooked like the Lima beans. They may also be boiled with pork like green beans. It takes from one to two hours to cook kidney beans.
Stewed Shelled Beans. 1 quart shelled beans. ¼ pound salt pork. 1 onion. 1/2 teaspoonful pepper. 1 tablespoonful flour. 1 quart boiling water.
Salt to taste.
Cut the pork in slices and fry it slowly ten minutes in a stewpan.
Add the onion, cut fine, and cook twenty minutes very slowly. Cover the beans with boiling water and boil ten minutes. Drain off the water.
Put the beans and flour in the stewpan with the pork and onion, and stir over the fire for five minutes.
A cluster of shell- and snap-bean methods from the vegetable chapter, written when beans were picked young and cooked long. The measurements need a little translation and the cooking times need shortening.
- The salt pork quantityThe printed "14 pound salt pork" for a quart of beans is a quarter pound; a fourteen-pound piece would be absurd against a quart of beans. A quarter pound of salt pork, sliced thin, renders enough fat to carry the onion and flour.
- A quart of shelled beansRoughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of shelled fresh beans, which is 3 to 4 lb in the pod. The stewed dish serves four to six as a side.
- Cooking times for shell beansThe book gives one to two hours for kidney beans, even though it says they should be gathered while the seeds are still tender. Fresh, genuinely tender shell beans are usually done in 25 to 40 minutes; taste rather than trust the clock.
- Green pods, brieflyThe warning about losing color and flavor is the important line here. Runner and string beans want 4 to 7 minutes in well-salted boiling water, drained the moment they turn tender-crisp. The half hour in the opening fragment belongs to an older, stringier bean than anything sold now.
- Butter beansIn this book "butter bean" means the pale-yellow wax snap bean, pod and all, not the large flat lima that goes by that name in much of the American South today.
- Scarlet runnersStill grown largely for the flowers in the United States. The pods are best while young and flat; once the seeds swell the pod turns fibrous and is better shelled. The book does not explain "whittled"; the traditional English preparation is to string the pods and slice them thinly on the diagonal.
- Finishing the stewThe text breaks off after the flour is stirred in for five minutes. On the evidence of the ingredient list, the quart of boiling water is then added and the stew simmered until the beans are tender and the liquid thickened; the list gives salt to taste, and the earlier direction is to taste for salt near the end.
- Boiled with porkWhere the text says beans may be "boiled with pork," the pork is salt pork or a piece of streaky bacon, simmered with the beans for flavor and fat; it is not a separate meat course.
Bean cookery of this kind marks the moment before canning and freezing flattened the distinction between a snap bean, a shell bean and a dry bean. The same plant gave three different vegetables depending on when it was picked, and this household book had to explain all three. The salt pork, onion and flour treatment here resembles other American vegetable stews of the period, closer to a light fricassee than to the long-baked bean pot: fat rendered, aromatic softened, flour stirred in for body, liquid added. The note on scarlet runners is a fair reflection of the split between the two countries, since British kitchen gardeners had eaten runner pods as a summer staple for generations while American seed catalogues sold the same plant for its red flowers on a porch trellis. The insistence that green pods lose color and delicate flavor if overcooked is worth noticing in a book of this date, when most printed vegetable directions still ran to twenty minutes or more.