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Butter-Bean Stock
1/2 pound butter beans 3 quarts water 1 teaspoon salt 1 ounce onion 1 ounce carrot 1 ounce celery Wash the beans, and soak them in one quart of water all night. Skin them, and tie them up in a muslin. Put them into a saucepan, with the skins and the water in which they were soaked, and two quarts besides. Add the salt, bringing to a boiling point. Skim, and add the vegetables. Boil gently for two hours. Take out the beans, strain, and the stock is ready for use.
A plain vegetable stock built on dried beans rather than bones, and one of the few meatless bases with real body to it. Almost everything here still works; the vocabulary is what needs translating.
- Butter beansIn this period the term generally means dried lima beans, the large flat white ones, rather than the fresh beans sold under that name in some regions today. Dried baby limas can be substituted.
- Skinning themAfter the overnight soak the skins slip off between finger and thumb. They are not thrown away: the recipe puts them back into the pan along with the water the beans soaked in.
- The muslin bagTying the beans in cloth is so they can be lifted out whole after two hours rather than fished out or pushed through the strainer. A square of cheesecloth or a large tea infuser does the same. The cooked beans are worth keeping for a purée, a salad or a second soup.
- Vegetables by weightAn ounce each of onion, carrot and celery is very little: roughly a quarter of a medium onion, a two-inch length of carrot, one short rib of celery. Cut them coarsely so they strain out cleanly.
- Boil gentlyRead this as a bare simmer, barely moving. A rolling boil will drive the bean starch into suspension and give you a cloudy, slightly gluey liquid instead of a clear one.
- SaltA teaspoon in three quarts is a light seasoning, and the stock will probably want seasoning again in whatever dish it goes into.
- YieldExpect somewhat less than the three quarts that go in, depending on how hard it simmers and whether the pan is covered; the recipe does not say. Cool it quickly, refrigerate up to four days, or freeze in pint portions.
Nearly every soup, sauce and gravy in the standard repertoire began with meat stock, which left cooks avoiding meat needing bases built from something else — dried peas and beans, root vegetables, mushroom trimmings. Dried legumes gave a fuller result than a thin vegetable infusion. Such recipes could serve vegetarians on principle as well as households observing Lent or, in the years around the First World War, the meatless days urged by food-conservation campaigns.