Home › Salad Recipes › String Bean Salad
String Bean Salad
1 quart string beans 2 teaspoonfuls vinegar Salt and pepper to taste 3 tablespoonfuls olive oil 1 teaspoonful onion juice Cut the beans into inch lengths and boil till tender in boiling salted water. Drain, and while they are hot pour over them the vinegar, onion juice, salt, and pepper. Let get perfectly cold; just before serving mix the olive oil with them.
Serve in white china ramequins.
A simple marinated bean salad whose one real technique is dressing the beans while they are still hot. Everything else is seasoning to taste.
- The hinge: dress them hotVinegar, onion juice, salt and pepper go on the beans the moment they are drained, while the surface is still open and steaming. That is when they absorb seasoning; oil added at this stage would only coat them and block it, which is why it is held back until serving.
- A quart of beansMeasured raw and cut, a quart is roughly a pound of green beans, enough for about four small servings. The original gives no yield.
- "Boil till tender"For period cooks this often meant fifteen minutes or more, appropriate to the stringy, tough-podded varieties then sold. Modern green beans are tender in 4 to 6 minutes in well-salted boiling water; test one and stop while it still has snap.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp in a sieve, or grate it straight into the beans and discard the fibre. It gives onion flavour without pieces, which is the point in a salad meant to look clean.
- Dressing ratioThree tablespoons oil to two teaspoons vinegar is far leaner in acid than a modern vinaigrette. Taste after chilling and add vinegar or a squeeze of lemon if it reads flat; cold food needs more acid and salt than warm.
- RamequinsHere the word means small individual porcelain dishes, not the cheese preparation of the same name. Any small bowl or ramekin serves; the instruction is about presenting a portion per person rather than a platter.
- Chilling"Let get perfectly cold" means chilled right through before the oil goes on; an hour or so in the refrigerator will do it. The beans will dull in colour as the vinegar works on them, which is expected and not a fault.
String beans earned their name honestly: many garden varieties carried a tough fibrous string along the seam that had to be pulled off before cooking, and breeders' work on stringless types -- under way from the 1890s and spreading through the twentieth century -- is what turned the chore into a memory while leaving the name behind. A cold bean salad dressed with oil, vinegar and onion belongs to the broad family of vegetable salads that entered American cookbooks from French practice, where cooked vegetables dressed while warm were served as hors d'oeuvre.