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String Beans
Remove all strings. Cut in inch pieces. Wash, cook in boiling water fifteen minutes. Add salt and cook until tender. Drain, add butter, salt and pepper. A piece of salt pork cooked with beans is considered by many an improvement.
A plain boiled-bean method from an era when green beans were genuinely stringy and often left on the stove far longer than we would now. The technique is sound; the timing belongs to a different bean.
- The beans have changed"String beans" meant pods with a tough fibrous seam that had to be zipped off along both edges. Nearly all supermarket green beans today are stringless varieties, so the first instruction is usually moot: just top them and, if you like, tail them.
- TimingFifteen minutes plus "cook until tender" gives an olive-drab bean. Modern varieties are done in 4-6 minutes for crisp-tender, 8-10 if you want them fully soft. Test one rather than watching the clock.
- Salt the water firstThe original adds salt only partway through the cooking. Salt the water generously from the start, as you would for pasta; it seasons the pod rather than sitting on the outside.
- Cut sizeInch pieces cook evenly, and that is what the recipe calls for. Whole beans work equally well and look better, but add a minute or two.
- ColourTo keep them green, cook uncovered in a large volume of water at a hard boil, and drain the moment they are done. If they are not going straight to the table, a plunge into ice water stops the carryover cooking.
- The salt porkA two-ounce piece of salt pork or a bacon end, simmered with the beans, is a Northern habit that parallels Southern long-cooked beans with fatback. It will season the water heavily, so cut back or omit the added salt.
- YieldNot stated. Reckon on 1 lb of beans for four as a side dish, finished with about a tablespoon of butter.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, is remembered for its chocolate recipes, but it also carried a full general kitchen section so it could serve as a family's only manual. This entry shows the era's vegetable cookery at its most typical: boil hard, boil long, finish with butter. The name "string bean" records a real feature of the pods then grown — the fibrous strand along the seam that had to be pulled before cooking. Stringless varieties were introduced commercially in the 1890s and gradually displaced the older sorts, which is why the term survives now only as a habit of speech. The optional salt pork is a New England reflex, the same seasoning logic that put a scrap of pork into chowder, baked beans and greens across the whole northeastern kitchen.