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Beans, Boiled Broad
INGREDIENTS. To each 1/2 gallon of water allow 1 heaped tablespoonful of salt; beans.
AVERAGE COST, 6d. per peck.
This is a favourite vegetable with many persons, but, to be nice, should be young beans, put them into and freshly gathered. After shelling the boiling water, salted in the above proportion, and let them boil rapidly until tender. Drain them well in a colander; dish, put a small piece of butter on the top, and serve with them, separately, a tureen of parsley and butter.
Boiled bacon is very often an accompaniment to this vegetable, but the beans should be cooked separately. It is usually served with the beans laid round, and the parsley and butter in a tureen.
Beans also make an excellent garnish to a ham, and when used for this purpose, if very old, should have their skins removed.
TIME.-Very young beans, 15 minutes; when a moderate size, 20 to 25 minutes, or longer.
BROAD BEANS.
SEASONABLE in July and August.
Broad beans are what most shops now sell as fava beans, and the chief adjustment is time: Victorian boiling times will reduce anything but the oldest beans to mush.
- TimingFifteen to twenty-five minutes suits large, starchy end-of-season beans. Young shelled favas need 3-5 minutes in rapidly boiling water, larger ones 5-8. Test one before you drain the pan.
- The salt ratioA heaped tablespoon to half a gallon is roughly 1 tablespoon to 8 cups, which is about right for vegetable water and can be followed as written.
- Double-poddingBeeton's advice to skin very old beans applies more widely than she suggests. Once the pods are bigger than a finger, slip each bean out of its grey skin after boiling; blanch, cool in cold water, and pinch. The bean underneath is bright green and sweet.
- "Parsley and butter"Not parsley butter but the Victorian sauce of the same name: a white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk with chopped parsley stirred through at the end. A tureen of plain melted butter with parsley does the same job.
- A peck2 gallons dry measure, about 8 quarts of beans in the pod, perhaps 8-10 lb, which shells down to a small fraction of that. Reckon 1 lb of pods per person for a side dish, or about 1 1/2 cups shelled beans for two.
- SeasonJuly and August still marks the British broad bean season, which in practice runs a little either side of it. Frozen favas are already shelled, though usually not skinned, and go straight into boiling water for 2-3 minutes.
- FavismBroad beans can cause severe haemolysis in people with G6PD deficiency, an inherited condition most common in Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and South Asian populations. Worth knowing before serving them to a crowd.
Broad beans (Vicia faba) are among the oldest beans in European cooking, grown across the continent for millennia before the American haricot and runner beans arrived, and before those arrivals "bean" in English generally meant this one. Beeton's sixpence a peck marks them as cheap bulk food, and the pairing with boiled bacon is a classic English combination: beans and salt pork, with a parsley sauce to carry both. The instruction to cook the bacon separately is worth noting, since earlier English cookery had in places boiled meat and vegetables together in one pot. Beeton's own practice is to cook each vegetable in its own salted water and serve its sauce apart, which is the arrangement the recipe describes with the beans laid round and the tureen at the side.