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Kidney Beans with Brown Sauce
1 quart of kidney beans, 1 teaspoonful of salt, A slice of onion, 1 pound of soup meat, 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour.
Put the beans into a saucepan with the meat and cover with boiling water, boil gently thirty minutes, then add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil until tender. Put the butter into a frying pan, and when very brown add the flour, and brown again. Then add one pint of the water in which the beans were boiled, stirring continually until boiling and smooth, add the onion chopped fine, and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper. Drain the beans, add them to the sauce, simmer ten minutes and serve.
A plain braise of beans finished in a brown roux sauce, from the era when a pound of cheap stewing beef went into the pot as seasoning rather than as the main event. Two things decide the result: how the beans are started, and how far the flour is browned.
- The hinge is the browned flourButter and flour must go well past blond — a nutty, chestnut-coloured roux is the whole flavour of the dish. Browned flour has much less thickening power than pale roux, so the sauce will stay looser than a white sauce, and that is correct. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; scorched flour turns the sauce bitter and cannot be rescued.
- A quart of beansMeasured dry, a quart is about 4 cups, roughly 1.5 to 1.6 lb, which swells to something in the region of 10 cups cooked — enough for about eight. If you want less, halve everything including the pint of bean liquor.
- Dried or freshThe recipe is ambiguous. "Kidney beans" in nineteenth-century books could mean the dried red bean or a fresh shell or French bean. If dried, soak overnight first and expect something like 1 to 1.5 hours of simmering after the initial thirty minutes; fresh shell beans should be tender in roughly 25 to 35 minutes total.
- Kidney beans need a real boilRaw and undercooked red kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin, which causes violent short-lived gastric illness. Ten minutes at a full rolling boil destroys it. The original's "boil gently" is on the cautious side of adequate — start with a hard boil before dropping to a simmer, and never finish these beans in a slow cooker at low heat.
- Soup meatThis means an inexpensive gelatinous cut — beef shin, chuck, or a marrow bone with some meat on it, about a pound. It flavours the cooking liquor rather than being served in the sauce. Slice or shred it back into the finished dish if you like, or keep it for another meal.
- Salt the beans lateThe instruction to add salt only after thirty minutes reflects the old belief that early salting toughens skins. Modern testing suggests salted soaking water actually softens skins, but salting late does no harm here, and it lets you judge the seasoning against the salinity of the meat.
- The raw onionA slice of onion chopped fine and dropped into boiling sauce may still taste sharp after only ten minutes of simmering. Sweat it in the butter before the flour goes in, or use a full small onion and give the sauce twenty minutes.
- Bean liquorThe pint of cooking water is the stock for the sauce, so do not tip it out when draining. It carries starch from the beans and gelatin from the meat, which gives the sauce body beyond what the browned flour provides.
Beans finished in a dark roux sauce is a habit found in Central European cookery, and dishes of the Bohnen in brauner So\Austrian type were familiar household food; whether this particular recipe descends from that tradition is not something the book tells us. The technique of browning butter and flour hard before wetting it is the same one behind sauce espagnole and, further on, the roux of Louisiana cooking. The pound of soup meat here works as a seasoning agent, cooked with the beans to lend them body and savour. The kidney bean itself is a New World domesticate, carried to Europe in the sixteenth century and returned to American tables as a cheap, storable staple.