Shelled Beans
Cook in boiling water until tender. Add salt after the first hour. Time of cooking depends upon age of beans. Drain. Serve with butter or cream or white Lima, kidney, or agricultural beans may be sauce. cooked in this way.
A bare-bones method for fresh shell beans — beans shucked from the pod but not dried. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a pot of beans looks like when it is done, so the useful additions are timing, salting and what to do with the varieties named.
- Fresh shell beans, not driedThese are beans taken green from the pod in late summer, not the dried kind, which is why no soaking is mentioned. Fresh shell beans generally cook in 20 to 40 minutes; the reference to a "first hour" implies a longer cooking than that, though the recipe itself gives no times and notes only that they depend on the age of the beans.
- SaltingThe old rule of holding salt back was meant to keep skins from toughening. Modern testing suggests salted water actually softens skins, so salting from the start is fine, and it seasons the interior of the bean rather than only the surface.
- Agricultural beansGenerally taken to mean the cranberry or horticultural bean, the cream-coloured pod streaked with red, sold today as cranberry, borlotti or Roman beans. The mottling boils away to a plain buff colour.
- Judging donenessA bean is done when it crushes smoothly against the roof of the mouth with no chalky centre. Undercooked shell beans taste raw and starchy; there is no benefit in pulling them early for texture.
- Cream sauceThe white sauce named here is the usual flour-butter-milk sauce; a medium version of the period runs about 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk, though the recipe gives no proportions. Thin it slightly with a little of the bean cooking water for a better consistency over drained beans.
- YieldPods lose well over half their weight in shelling, and the yield varies with variety and maturity; reckon roughly a pound of beans in the pod per one to two servings shelled.
Fresh shell beans occupy a brief window between the snap bean of early summer and the dried bean of winter, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks treated them as a distinct vegetable with its own entry. Lima, kidney and "agricultural" (cranberry) beans were all grown in home gardens and sold shelled or in the pod at market, a trade that has largely vanished from supermarkets in favour of frozen Limas and dried beans in bags. Lowney's, published by the Boston chocolate firm, was a general household cookbook rather than a confectionery pamphlet, which is why a plain vegetable method like this sits alongside the company's cocoa recipes.