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Dried Peas, Beans and Lentils
The dried legumes are excellent if properly cooked, and form a palatable dish if simply boiled until tender and seasoned with butter, pepper and salt. The first important step is the swelling and softening of the legume by soaking in water a number of hours, usually not less than eight, and the removal of such parts as will not soften by cooking. The skin of the ripened pea and lentil is easily removed, and both peas and lentils are therefore more easily prepared than beans. Many kinds of beans, however, after proper soaking may be freed from their skins by stirring in water. The skins rise to the top and can be skimmed off. The large lima beans after soaking may easily be slipped out of the skins by pressing them between the fingers.
Soft water should be used for both soaking and boiling the legumes; but if neither is available, simply boil the water before using and pour it from the sediment. In soaking beans baking soda may be used to soften the water (using a quarter teaspoon of soda dissolved in one quart of water to every pound of beans), as it increases the digestibility of the beans and does not destroy the flavor.
Dried peas, beans and lentils are better if cooked slowly all day. If desired, the flavor may be improved by the addition of onion, flavoring herbs or meat stock. The legumes may be left whole or mashed through a sieve. In either case they will be greatly improved by the addition of butter and abundant seasoning; the salt should be cooked with them, allowing one half tablespoon for one pint of beans, and the pepper added with the butter.
A general method rather than a fixed dish, and most of it still holds. The parts worth revisiting are the soda, the all-day cooking, and the skinning.
- Go easy on the sodaA quarter teaspoon per quart is a restrained dose and will not do much harm, but more than that turns skins slippery, greys the beans, gives a faintly soapy taste and destroys thiamine. If your water is hard and beans refuse to soften, soda helps; otherwise skip it.
- Salt with the beansThe instruction to cook the salt in is sound and contradicts the old advice to salt only at the end. Half a tablespoon per pint of beans (read as dry measure) seasons them through and appears to help the skins stay intact. Salted soaking water seems to work the same way.
- "Cooked slowly all day"On a range kept going all day this made sense. On a modern burner, a bare simmer brings most soaked beans to tenderness in 1 to 2 hours, chickpeas and older beans longer. A pressure cooker does soaked beans in roughly 8 to 12 minutes at high pressure.
- Kidney beans need a hard boilRaw red and white kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin. Soak and drain them, then give them a full rolling boil for at least ten minutes before dropping to a simmer. Prolonged cooking at temperatures below boiling does not destroy the lectin and can leave the beans more toxic than raw, so never cook them from dry in a slow cooker on low.
- Soaking timeEight hours is the traditional figure and works. A hot soak (boil one minute, stand covered one hour) does the same job. Beans more than a year old may never fully soften no matter what you do.
- Skinning is optionalThe peeling and skimming described here was aimed at digestibility and a smooth purée. Modern cooks generally leave the skins on for whole beans; skin only when you want a very fine purée, and a food mill or blender now does what the sieve did.
- Soft waterHard, mineral-rich water genuinely slows softening. Boiling and decanting, as described, removes temporary hardness. Bottled soft or distilled water is the simpler modern route.
- YieldOne pint of dried beans is a little under a pound and swells to roughly five to six cups cooked, enough for about six servings as a main dish with the butter and seasoning the recipe insists on.
Advice of this kind belongs to the domestic-science tradition, in which pulses were promoted as cheap protein by teachers and government pamphlets alike. The insistence on soaking, skinning and long slow cooking reflects a period preoccupation with digestibility, then generally attributed to bean skins. The baking-soda trick for hard water is older still, common in nineteenth-century manuals, and the advice to boil and decant sediment is a reminder that soft water was not something every reader could assume.