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S. T to Boil Snaps
Early in the morning, string round, tender snaps. Throw into water and set in a cool place, till an hour before dinner, when they must be drained and thrown into a pot where the bacon is boiling.--Mrs. S. T.
Four lines that assume you already keep a pot of bacon simmering on the stove. The whole recipe is really about that pot liquor, and about beans of a type most stores no longer sell.
- "Snaps"Snap beans, meaning fresh green beans in the pod, named for the sound a fresh one makes when broken. "Round" most likely distinguishes round-podded beans from flat-podded ones; either will work here.
- StringingNearly all supermarket green beans are now bred stringless, so the stringing step is obsolete. If you have heirloom pole beans, snap off the stem end and pull the fibrous seam down the length of the pod.
- The cold soakThe morning soak in cool water is a crisping and holding step from a kitchen without refrigeration. A covered bowl in the refrigerator does the same job, and beans bought that day need nothing at all.
- The bacon potThis is not sliced breakfast bacon but a boiling piece of cured side meat or streaky salt pork, simmered for hours to make a salty pot liquor. Roughly 1/4 lb of salt pork per pound of beans in enough water to cover is a workable ratio, and no additional salt should go in until you have tasted the liquid.
- "An hour before dinner"Dinner was the main meal of the day, taken at midday or in the early afternoon, so the beans get a full hour of simmering. That is deliberate Southern practice, not carelessness: the beans collapse, lose their squeak, and take up the pork fat. If you want bright, snappy beans, this is the wrong recipe.
- Water levelKeep the beans covered through the hour, adding boiling water as needed. Beans left half out of the liquor scorch onto the pot and the salt concentrates fast.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of beans serves six as a side dish. Serve them with some of the liquor spooned over, and cornbread to take up the rest.
Green beans boiled in pork liquor are one of the oldest continuous habits of Southern cooking, and the reason so many nineteenth-century Virginia recipes for vegetables are this brief: the pot of side meat was already on the fire for dinner, and the vegetable was simply dropped in when its turn came. Cured pork was the year-round household staple, cheap and shelf-stable in a climate that punished fresh meat, and it seasoned everything from beans to cabbage to greens. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one carries only "Mrs. S. T." and assumes a reader who knows exactly what a pot of boiling bacon looks like. The word "snaps" for the pods survives in regional speech alongside "snap beans" and "string beans"; the last of those names is a fossil, since commercial breeding had largely removed the string by the mid-twentieth century.