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French Beans
Cut in strips and boiled, they are served as- Haricots verts à l'Anglaise – with butter and chopped parsley. à la Maître d'hôtel-with Maître d'hôtel sauce. à la Poulette-with Poulette sauce. au beurre noir-with black-butter sauce. aux fines herbes in a butter sauce with chopped parsley and shallots. sautés are sauté in butter with chopped parsley.
Haricotspanachés à la Maître d'hôtel are French beans and haricot beans with Maître d'hôtel sauce.
Seven names for green beans, boiled and then dressed with a different butter or sauce each time. The page is short, and what is useful in it is the method rather than any one dish.
- Cut in stripsThese beans are sliced lengthways into strips before boiling, not left whole or cut into lengths. It is a different vegetable on the plate: thinner, softer, with more sauce clinging to it. The old English word for the operation was Frenching.
- The boiling is too long“Boiled” in this book means cooked soft right through, and the butters that follow are partly a repair. Boil hard in well-salted water for a few minutes, until a bean bends without breaking, and the same dressings become a choice rather than a cover.
- Maître d’hôtel butterButter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, chilled into a roll and sliced onto the hot vegetable. It turns up on page after page of this book and it is the most useful single thing in it. Make a roll and keep it in the freezer.
- Black butter is darker than you thinkBeurre noir is butter taken well past nut brown, until it is genuinely dark, and then finished with a splash of vinegar. It is not beurre noisette, and the vinegar is not optional.
- Haricots panachésGreen beans and cooked dried haricot beans together, dressed with the parsley butter. Panaché means variegated. It is the best thing on the page and it has quietly vanished from English cooking.
Haricots panachés is the page’s one piece of evidence about the store cupboard. Dried white haricots sat in a sack all year; fresh green beans came for a few weeks in late summer. Putting the two in one dish stretched the fresh across more plates and gave the cook something to send up on the days in between. The French name makes it sound like a flourish. It was arithmetic.