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Broad Beans
Fèves de marais à l'Anglaise are boiled, and served with parsley and butter. à la crème are boiled in milk with chopped parsley; served in the sauce with cream, etc. à la Romaine are stewed, and served with a purée of tomatoes. à la Mentone are served in Soubise sauce, garnished with little rolls of bacon breadcrumbed and fried, and croûtons sprinkled with grated cheese.
Purée de fèves is a purée of beans.
BEETROOT.
Cut in slices, beetroot is served as- Betteraves à la crème-boiled in a white sauce.
This is not a recipe but an entry in a glossary. It lists the French names a dinner card would use for broad beans, and tells you in one line each what arrived on the plate.
- Broad beans are fava beansFèves de marais is what a British greengrocer sells as broad beans and an American market sells as favas. Shelled, each bean carries a second skin that toughens as the season goes on, and most of what follows depends on that skin being slipped off after a short blanching.
- The English style is the plain oneÀ l’Anglaise here means boiled, drained, parsley and butter, and nothing else. It is the baseline the other four names are variations on.
- Soubise is onionsÀ la Mentone sets the beans in Soubise sauce, which is a thick onion purée, not a cream or tomato sauce. The page does not say so because it was written for someone who already knew.
- No weights, no times, no yieldsThere is not a single quantity on this page and there never was one. The reader was choosing what to put on a card; the cooking was someone else’s department. Read each line as a brief rather than an instruction.
- Beetroot now comes ready cookedThe beetroot note assumes you boiled it yourself, which takes most of an hour. Vacuum-packed cooked beetroot slices straight into the white sauce; the one thing it will not give you is the cooking liquor.
A page like this exists because of a specific household problem: the card was written in French and the food was cooked in an English kitchen. The lines are arranged for exactly that transaction, with the French name first and the plain description second, so a name could be picked and then passed downstairs. The run of styles attached to one cheap vegetable also shows how much of the work was being done by the garnish rather than the main ingredient. Beans with parsley butter, beans in cream, beans under tomato purée, and beans in onion sauce with fried bacon rolls and cheese croûtons all started from the same pot of beans. The difference in grandeur was entirely in what the kitchen put round them.