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String Beans with Cream
Prepare the beans as directed in the preceding recipe. Put them in a saucepan of boiling water, add two ounces of ham, and boil gently one hour. Drain, remove the ham, return the beans to the saucepan. Add an ounce of butter, a gill of cream and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper.
A straightforward finish for green beans, written when beans were tough, fibrous and genuinely needed long cooking. The one thing to change is the hour.
- The boiling timeAn hour will reduce modern green beans to olive-drab mush. Today's stringless varieties need 4 to 7 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until just tender with a little resistance left. Taste one at four minutes and go from there.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. With an ounce of butter that is a generous sauce for about a pound of beans.
- "The preceding recipe"The missing step is trimming: snap off the stem ends and pull away the tough side string, then leave whole or break into inch lengths. Nearly all beans sold now are bred stringless, so trimming the ends is enough.
- The hamThe recipe specifies only two ounces of ham, added for flavour and lifted out before the cream goes in; any salty cured piece, including a hock or a scrap of rind, will do the job. If you are only boiling the beans a few minutes it has no time to give anything up, so either simmer the ham in the water for 20 minutes first and cook the beans in that liquid, or skip it and salt the water properly.
- FinishingDrain the beans thoroughly, then return them to the dry pan with the butter and cream and let it bubble a minute or two until it clings. Cream that is only warmed through will pool at the bottom of the dish.
- Holding aheadIf you are not serving immediately, shock the drained beans in ice water to fix the colour, then reheat them in the butter and cream at the last moment.
- YieldAs written this dresses roughly a pound of beans, serving four as a side dish.
Boiling a piece of salt pork or ham with green beans is one of the oldest and most persistent habits in Anglo-American vegetable cookery, and it is often connected with the long-simmered Southern green bean, though the line of descent cannot really be demonstrated. The hour-long boil in this recipe is not carelessness: nineteenth-century pole and runner beans were picked larger, had a genuine fibrous string down the seam, and toughened quickly after picking, so cooks treated them the way they treated a tough cut of meat. Stringless snap beans were being bred and marketed from the late nineteenth century onward, though published cooking times were slower to change and stayed long well into the twentieth century. The cream-and-butter finish here belongs to a different tradition, the fashionable French-inflected household cooking that American manuals were eager to teach, and books of this sort routinely offered the same vegetable half a dozen ways: plain, with cream, with a white sauce, in a salad.