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Butter Bean Salad
2 cups cold butter beans 2 hard-cooked eggs French dressing parsley Cream dressing few drops onion juice Cover beans with French dressing and let stand one half hour. Drain, sprinkle with onion juice, mix with cream dressing. Arrange on serving dish and garnish with slices of hard-cooked eggs, cut lengthwise, and parsley.
A two-dressing salad of the sort common in American cookbooks around 1900: an acid marinade first, a creamy dressing second. The instructions assume you already know the two dressings by heart, which is the only real obstacle.
- Butter beansIn American usage these are lima beans, usually the large flat variety. Dried limas soaked and simmered until tender, then cooled, give the texture the recipe wants; frozen large limas cooked and drained work as well. Canned are softer and will break up when mixed.
- French dressing, 1907 senseNot the sweet orange bottled product. It means oil and vinegar in roughly three to one with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, no sugar and no ketchup.
- Cream dressingIn this period the term covers either a boiled dressing (egg, vinegar, a little flour or mustard, cooked thick and thinned with cream) or mayonnaise loosened with cream. Either suits; use enough only to coat, about a third of a cup for two cups of beans.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze it in a piece of cloth. A few drops means a few drops; the point is a background savour, not onion flavour.
- The half hour mattersThe marinade is where the beans take their seasoning, since a cream dressing sits on the surface rather than penetrating. Drain them well afterwards or the second dressing will thin and slide off.
- Serve coldEverything should be thoroughly chilled before assembly, and the eggs sliced at the last minute so the yolks stay bright.
- YieldTwo cups of beans serves four as a side salad, arranged on lettuce if you want a base the original does not mention.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate maker, and like other manufacturer-sponsored books of the period it surrounds its promotional confectionery chapters with a full general cookbook. Its salad section belongs to the American salad boom of the early twentieth century, when cold composed dishes dressed with mayonnaise or boiled dressing moved from the luncheon table into everyday middle-class cooking. The two-stage dressing here is a hallmark of that moment: cooks were taught that vegetables should be marinated in an oil-and-vinegar dressing to season them through, then bound with something richer for the table. Butter bean is a common Southern name for the lima; it is traditionally connected to the bean's pale colour and soft texture, though that explanation is folk usage rather than documented etymology.