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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Beans
To Store Green Beans. -Pack down green string beans in glass jars between layers of salt. Seal the jars. When required for use, freshen in clear water for several hours, changing the water frequently. - To Store Green Peas.
Select shelled peas that are full grown but not hard and dry them in a dripping pan in a very slow oven or on the back of the stove. Let them dry slowly, stirring them frequently, and do not have them too thick in the pan. Continue the heat until they are hard and dry as bone. Pack in glass or stone jars. Seal and keep in a dry place. Let 'soak overnight in cold water before boiling.
To Store Dry Beans.-Dry shelled beans should be stored in a dry, cool place, and will not require protection unless they become infested with bugs. In that case place the beans in a coarse sack or basket and dip them in boiling water for a minute or two. Hang up to drip dry and they will not only be free from insects but will also keep better.
To Store Lima Beans. - Gather lima beans before they ripen, and while they are still tender and green.
Spread them on cloths in the sun to dry.
Four unrelated storage methods on one page, from a period when a household put up its own vegetables as a matter of course. One of them — the salt-packed green beans — is a curing procedure given without a single measured quantity, and that is the reason for the warning above.
- Why the salted beans failDry-salting green beans works only when the salt is heavy enough (traditionally on the order of a pound of salt to three or four pounds of beans, layered so the vegetable sits in saturated brine) to hold water activity below the point where Clostridium botulinum can grow. "Between layers of salt" specifies nothing. A sealed jar of low-acid vegetables at room temperature with too little salt is exactly the anaerobic, non-acid environment botulinum spores need, and the toxin gives no smell, no gas and no off taste. Use a current tested recipe for brined or pressure-canned beans instead.
- The insect dipScalding buggy dry beans and then hanging them to "drip dry" leaves rehydrated surfaces on a food meant to be bone-dry. In a warm kitchen that invites mould rather than preventing it. Freezing dried beans for several days is the modern answer to weevils.
- "A very slow oven"Period household books generally put a very slow oven somewhere around 250F, and the back of a coal range would have been cooler still. A home dehydrator at 125-135F, or an oven propped open at its lowest setting, does the same job with less scorching.
- Peas dried "hard as bone"That is the real test, not a clock. Shelled peas should rattle and shatter rather than dent under a fingernail; anything leathery in the centre will mould in the jar. Keep them thin in the pan, as the text says, and stir often.
- Conditioning dried peas and limasAfter drying, hold the batch loosely in a jar for a week and shake it daily. Any condensation on the glass means moisture is still present and the lot needs more drying — a step the original leaves to experience.
- Sun-drying limasPractical only in genuinely hot, dry, low-humidity weather, and the cloths need covering against insects and birds and bringing indoors at night. Beans dried green while still tender cook faster than mature dry limas.
- Soaking and cookingOvernight in cold water, as written, then a fresh change of water for boiling. Home-dried peas and limas may cook faster than older commercial stock, so check them early.
- Raw vs. cooked limasLima beans, particularly coloured varieties, contain cyanogenic compounds, which is why they should be boiled uncovered rather than eaten undercooked. Drying does not remove them; a full uncovered boil drives off the released hydrogen cyanide.
This page appears to belong to the last generation of American household books written before home freezing and reliable commercial canning made most of it unnecessary, though nothing here fixes its date. Salt-packing green beans is an old northern European and colonial practice, drawing water out of the food until nothing can live in it, the same principle as salt pork, and it is often said to have survived into the twentieth century as Salzbohnen in German-American kitchens and as "salt beans" in New England. Drying peas is older still and far more widespread: the dried pea, not the fresh one, was the everyday form for most of European history, and the fresh green pea was a luxury novelty when it reached seventeenth-century French tables. What dates the entry is not the techniques but the containers. Glass jars with sealing lids were cheap and universal by 1900, so a book like this could tell a reader to "seal the jars" without explaining anything further, while offering no guidance at all on how much salt to use.