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Haricot Beans
White haricot beans, boiled, are served as- Haricots blancs à la Maître d'hôtel, or à la Bretonne-with Maître d'hôtel or Bretonne sauce; au beurre de piment-with capsicums pounded with butter; à la moëlle with beef marrow, etc. au jus are stewed in stock.
They are also served en purée with stock; or as Purée de haricots à la crème-a purée with cream.
Haricots rouges à la Bourguignonne are red haricot beans cooked in stock with onions, wine, etc.
Flageolets may be dressed au jus-stewed in stock; à la Poulette-boiled and served in Poulette sauce; and in many of the ways suggested for peas.
Three short paragraphs on dried beans, in a book that gives puddings twenty pages. The brevity is itself informative, and the first word is a trap.
- Haricot means the dried beanHaricots blancs are white dried beans — what a shop now sells as haricot, navy or cannellini. Because haricots verts has taken over the English use of the word, a modern reader meets “haricot beans” and pictures something green and fresh. Everything on this page is a pulse, soaked and simmered.
- Tinned beans will not take this treatmentAu jus means stewed in stock, and à la Bourguignonne means cooked in stock with onions and wine. Both want a bean that starts firm and absorbs over an hour or more. Beans from a tin are already at the end of that process and will break up into the sauce. Dried beans, soaked overnight, are not a refinement here but a requirement.
- Flageolets are a different beanThe page treats them separately, and it is right to: flageolets are haricots picked immature, pale green, finer in skin and more delicate in flavour. They are still easy to buy dried in France and awkward elsewhere. The page also notes they take many of the treatments given to peas, which is a fair guide to how they eat.
- Au beurre de pimentCapsicums pounded with butter: a compound butter of sweet peppers, mashed to a paste and stirred through the hot beans. The name has gone and the technique is entirely alive — it is the quickest way to put flavour into a bowl of plain pulses.
- The sauce is somewhere else in the bookMaître d’hôtel, Bretonne and Poulette are all named and none is explained. These are index entries, not recipes, and they only work for a cook who owns the sauce chapter or knows it by heart. Treat the page as a list of destinations rather than directions.
- A bean purée was a coursePurée de haricots à la crème is beans sieved and enriched with cream, sent to the table on its own. The same thing now reads as a dip to be eaten with something else. Served hot in a dish as part of a vegetable course, it is better than that sounds.
Two things are worth noticing. The first is that pulses appear here as a dressed vegetable at a formal dinner rather than as cheap bulk: white beans with beef marrow, red beans in wine, flageolets in a cream sauce. The second is the length. The vegetable chapter gets a few lines per bean while the pudding pages run on for thousands of words, which is an accurate measure of where the attention of such a dinner went. The page also quietly records a difference between two cuisines: haricots rouges cooked in red wine with onions was normal French practice, and British cooking of the period had largely dropped dried beans altogether.