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Beans (Until tender This can be)
until tender. This can be ascertained by pressing the bean between the thumb and forefinger; if it mashes easily drain at once. Put them back into the saucepan, add a tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of lemon juice; chop a teaspoonful of parsley very fine, add to it one gill of the liquor in which the beans were boiled, mix with it one tablespoonful of flour, add to the beans. Stir very gently until boiled and serve.
The page picks up mid-recipe, after the beans have been put on to boil. What survives is the finishing sauce: a butter-and-lemon liaison thickened with a little flour and the bean cooking water.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Reserve the bean liquor before draining, or you will have nothing to build the sauce with.
- Mix the flour off the heatMix the flour into the liquor first -- Whisk the tablespoon of flour into the reserved bean liquor until smooth before it goes near the beans. The recipe does not say to cool the liquor, and flour stirred into very hot liquid is the more likely to lump.
- Which beansThe recipe does not say. A bean that mashes easily between thumb and forefinger could be a shelled or dried bean as readily as a fresh string or wax one. If using modern fresh beans, 5 to 8 minutes in boiling salted water is usually enough.
- "Until boiled"Bring the sauce just to a simmer and hold it about a minute so the raw flour taste cooks out. Longer and the beans go grey and slack.
- Lemon lastThe acid is added to the beans, not to the cooking water, and that order matters. Acid in the pot slows softening and keeps beans stubbornly firm.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified in the surviving text, though the page begins mid-recipe and salting may have been called for in the missing opening. Salt the water and check the finished sauce before serving.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of beans. As a rough guide, a tablespoon of butter and a gill of liquor will sauce about a pound.
Vegetable cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often said to have been part of a broader effort to rescue vegetables from the long, hard boil. The technique here is a thrifty domestic version of a classic French liaison: rather than making a separate white sauce, the cook binds a little of the vegetable's own cooking liquor with flour and enriches it with butter, so nothing of the flavour is poured down the sink. The lemon and chopped parsley finish belongs to the same family as the maitre d'hotel butters of the period.