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String Beans (1 tablespoonful of butter Salt)
1/4 peck of beans, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Salt and pepper to taste.
Cut the blossom end of the bean and pull it back to remove the string; then pare a thin strip from the other edge of the pod. In this way only are you sure that every string is removed. Cut the beans into pieces one inch long, throw in clear, cold water for thirty minutes. Drain, put in a saucepan of boiling water with a teaspoonful of salt and one of butter; boil gently one hour. Drain, put them in a vegetable dish, add the butter, salt and pepper. The first butter is to soften the beans while boiling.
The instructions are sound for the beans of 1900 and wrong for the beans you will buy today. The whole recipe hinges on one number.
- The hour of boilingModern green beans need 4 to 8 minutes in salted boiling water, depending on thickness, and are done when they bend without snapping. An hour reduces them to grey mush; the original assumes tough, fully mature pods with fibrous walls.
- No quantity givenThe heading lists only butter, salt and pepper. A tablespoon of butter and pepper to taste will dress roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of beans, serving four.
- StringingNearly all varieties sold now are bred stringless, so the careful paring of a strip from each edge is unnecessary. Snap off the stem end and leave the tapered tip. If you meet a genuine string when you snap one, string the rest as described.
- The cold-water soakThirty minutes in cold water was probably intended to crisp limp market beans and float off grit; the recipe itself gives no reason. Refrigerated beans need only a rinse; a soak does no harm but adds nothing.
- Butter in the cooking waterThe note that "the first butter is to soften the beans" reflects period belief rather than chemistry — fat does not tenderize pod walls. Salt the water generously and save the butter for the dish.
- ColourBeans dull from bright to olive with prolonged boiling, as acids released from the pods break down the chlorophyll. Drain the moment they are tender and, if they are not being served at once, spread them out or shock them in cold water rather than letting them sit in the hot pan.
- Gentle boil"Boil gently" is worth keeping. A hard rolling boil batters the pods and splits them; a steady simmer keeps them whole.
String beans are the immature pods of Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean of the Americas, eaten green rather than shelled and dried. The name is literal: until well into the twentieth century the pods carried a tough fibrous filament along each seam, and this recipe devotes as much space to removing it as to cooking. Stringless varieties had been introduced commercially by the 1890s but spread slowly through kitchen gardens and markets, which is why a book like this still insists on paring both edges as the only reliable method. The long boil belongs to the same vanished world -- nineteenth-century vegetable cookery generally aimed at softness rather than bite, and the notion that fat added to the water would help break down a stubborn pod, repeated here, has no basis. Reading the two instructions together gives a fair picture of what a plate of beans tasted like before plant breeders quietly rewrote the recipe.