Home › Salads and Dressings › Salad of String Beans
Salad of String Beans
Trim one pint of young beans and boil until tender, when done, drain, and throw into cold water until perfectly cold. Then dry on a soft towel and cut each bean into four pieces lengthwise. Arrange neatly on a salad dish, pour over French dressing and serve.
A plain composed salad that depends entirely on two things: how long the beans cook and how cold they get afterwards. The recipe's instinct to shock and dry them is sound and worth following exactly.
- The hinge: don't overcookThe recipe gives no time, and many nineteenth-century vegetable recipes that do specify one call for long boiling, which leaves beans olive-drab and limp. Young beans in well-salted boiling water need only 3-5 minutes — bright green and still with a snap.
- A pint of beansA dry-measure pint of trimmed beans is roughly half a pound, enough for two or three as a side salad. Buy a little over half a pound untrimmed.
- Cold water, then dryThe plunge into cold water stops the cooking and fixes the colour; the towel matters just as much, since dressing slides off wet beans and pools at the bottom of the dish.
- Cutting lengthwiseSlicing each bean into four long strips is the old "Frenching" cut. A julienne peeler or a bean slicer does it faster, and the strips take dressing far better than whole beans.
- French dressingIn a book of this date this means a simple vinaigrette — roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to emulsify. It is not the sweetened orange bottled product that later took the name in America.
- Dress at the tableVinegar dulls the green of beans fairly quickly. Arrange the beans, dress them just before they go out, and don't let the salad stand.
String beans earned the name honestly: nineteenth-century varieties carried a tough fibre along the seam that had to be pulled off with the stem end, and "trim" in a recipe like this meant stringing as well as topping and tailing. Stringless cultivars were bred and popularised around the turn of the twentieth century and gradually made the chore obsolete, though the name stuck. Serving a cooked vegetable cold under a vinaigrette rather than hot under butter is often described as a French habit that American and English cookbooks picked up in the late 1800s, and it may have served as a way to stretch the salad course beyond lettuce — a section that, before refrigeration and year-round produce, could otherwise be very thin.