Home › Meat Substitutes › Salad Beans
Salad Beans
1 quart string beans 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup hot water 1 tablespoon lemon juice Remove the strings and ends by paring with a sharp knife, and cut into three-quarter inch lengths. Put to cook in sufficient boiling salted water to cover, and cook from one to three hours, according to the age of the beans. When tender, pour off the water and measure. There should be about one cup of the liquid. Rub the flour and one-half of the butter together. Pour over this, stirring constantly, the hot liquid; then place over the fire, and cook five minutes. When finished cooking, remove from fire. Add lemon juice, and pour over the cooked beans.
A plain beurre-manié sauce on green beans, from an era when vegetables were boiled into submission. Only one instruction really needs overturning.
- The cooking timeOne to three hours will reduce string beans to grey pulp. Modern green beans, bred to be stringless and tender, need 4-6 minutes in boiling salted water, or 3 minutes if you plan to finish them in the sauce. Taste at 4 minutes and stop when they still have some snap.
- A quart of beansMeasured by volume, as vegetables usually were then: about 1 lb of trimmed beans, serving four as a side.
- StringingThe instruction to pare the strings off with a knife applies to older varieties with a tough fibre along the seam. Most beans sold now are stringless; just top them, and tail them if you like.
- The cup of hot waterIt appears in the ingredient list but never in the method, which instead calls for the cup of drained cooking liquid. Cook the beans in enough water to cover, save a cup of it, and ignore the separate measure — or top up with hot water if you have drained too enthusiastically.
- Rubbing flour and butterThis is a beurre manié: 1 tablespoon each of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, then stirred into the hot liquid off the heat before it goes back on. Use softened rather than melted butter, so the paste holds together and disperses smoothly.
- The second half of the butterThe recipe divides the butter but never says what to do with the remainder. Presumably it is stirred in at the end, after the sauce comes off the heat, for gloss — add it with the lemon juice.
- Five minutesThat is the minimum needed to cook out the raw flour taste. Stir throughout; a thin flour sauce catches quickly on the pan bottom.
- Lemon at the endAdded off the heat on purpose. Acid in a hot flour sauce will thin it, and boiled lemon juice loses its brightness.
This comes from a vegetarian household manual — a genre that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside the Seventh-day Adventist health-reform movement and the sanitarium kitchens associated with Battle Creek. The dish is a homely vegetable dressed with a beurre-manié liaison: butter and flour worked cold, slackened with the vegetable's own cooking water, sharpened with lemon. That such a dish should be offered in place of meat says less about the beans than about the book's argument, which was that a dish rich enough in fat and body could stand where a chop would have stood. The long boiling times are not carelessness — the beans of the period carried a tough fibrous string and a leathery pod wall, and the stringless varieties that make a four-minute bean possible were a later convenience.