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White Bean Sautés
This is a very good way of warming over cold beans.
Put two tablespoonfuls of butter into a frying pan, with a teaspoonful of chopped onion and a tablespoonful of chopped parsley. Put in the beans, shake over the fire until the beans are thoroughly heated; sprinkle with a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper and the juice of half a lemon. Serve very hot.
A leftovers dish with no stated quantity of beans, which is the one thing worth pinning down before you start.
- How many beansThe recipe never says. Working back from the seasonings, something in the region of 3 cups of cooked white beans (about two 15-oz cans, drained and rinsed) seems a reasonable guess; two tablespoons of butter and a teaspoon of salt would be heavy on much less.
- "Sautés""Sautés" -- In American cookbooks of this period a vegetable "sauté" generally meant no more than the vegetable tossed in hot fat in a pan, rather than anything browned or crusted. Keep the heat moderate; white beans break up if stirred hard.
- Shake, do not stirThe instruction to shake the pan is the hinge. A spoon mashes cooked beans into paste, while lifting and swirling the pan keeps them whole and coats them in the butter.
- Onion timingThe recipe does put the onion and parsley in the butter before the beans go in, but gives it no time there. Half a minute in the butter is enough to take the raw edge off the teaspoon of onion.
- Lemon at the endThe recipe adds the juice after the beans are hot, which is where it belongs; off the heat or in the last few seconds keeps it fresh-tasting.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted beans cooked at home. With canned beans, season at the end and taste.
- YieldNo yield is given. On the assumption above it would serve about four as a side dish. Worth serving on warmed plates, since beans in butter cool fast.
Recipes for "warming over" appear throughout nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American household cookery, when a pot of dried beans was cooked in quantity and had to carry through several meals. Thrift is the organising principle, and butter, onion, parsley and lemon are a familiar set of revivers for cold leftovers. The technique long predates the vocabulary used here, and the French word sauté came to be applied to plain American pan cookery in this period. The lemon is the detail that dates it least; brightening a starchy leftover with acid is still the whole trick.