Home › Cookery › To Boil Snaps Without Bacon
To Boil Snaps Without Bacon
Prepare as above directed. Boil an hour in hot water, adding a little salt, just before they are done. Drain and serve with pepper, fresh butter and a little cream.--Mrs. S. T.
TO STEW CYMLINGS (or Squash, as it is sometimes called). Peel and boil till tender. Run through a colander. To a pint of pulp, add one half pint rich milk, a heaping tablespoonful fresh butter and a little salt. Stew till thick like marmalade. Pepper freely, pour over it, if convenient, half teacup cream, and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
Two brief entries from the same contributor: snap beans cooked without the usual piece of side meat, and pattypan squash stewed down to a puree. Both assume you know the preceding recipe, which is the trap.
- "Prepare as above directed"The snaps recipe leans on the entry before it, which is not reproduced here; in period practice that would ordinarily mean stringing and snapping the beans into short lengths and washing them. Nothing is lost by simply topping, tailing and breaking the beans in half.
- SnapsSnap beans, i.e. green beans, named for the sound of a fresh pod breaking. Nineteenth-century varieties were tough and stringy, which is why an hour of boiling was reasonable. Modern stringless beans are done in 6 to 10 minutes and turn olive-drab and limp long before an hour.
- Salting at the endThe recipe holds the salt until "just before they are done" and gives no reason; the usual explanation offered for late salting is that it prevents toughening. Salting the water from the start gives better-seasoned beans.
- CymlingsPattypan or scallop squash, a summer squash. Any tender summer squash works. Peel only if the skin has gone hard; young ones need no peeling.
- Running through a colanderThis means pressing the cooked squash through the perforations to make a puree and leave the seeds and fibre behind. A food mill or a few pulses in a processor does the same work.
- Draining the squashThe recipe does not say to drain, but summer squash is largely water. Press the puree in a sieve or cook it down hard in a wide pan before adding the milk, or it will never reach the "thick like marmalade" stage.
- Teacup and pintA nineteenth-century teacup is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup; a pint is 2 cups. So a pint of squash puree takes 1 cup milk, a heaping tablespoon of butter, and about 1/3 cup cream at the finish -- the recipe's half teacup.
- YieldA pint of puree stewed down will serve perhaps three or four as a side dish. The snaps recipe gives no quantity of beans, so no yield can be stated for it.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many entries end with initials rather than a name. The title here is the interesting part: in the Virginia and wider Southern kitchen, snap beans were normally simmered a long while with a piece of bacon or side meat, so a version without bacon needed announcing, whether for a meatless day, an invalid's tray, or a household briefly out of cured pork. "Cymling" (also spelled simlin or cymbling) is a distinctly Southern word for the scallop-edged summer squash now usually sold as pattypan; the name is generally traced to the flattened, fluted simnel cake it was thought to resemble. Both dishes finish the same way, with fresh butter and cream, a reminder that in a house with its own dairy the enrichment cost nothing but the trouble of skimming.