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String Beans (Remove the strings carefully)
Remove the strings carefully; break the pods into one-inch pieces; wash thoroughly; add just enough boiling water to prevent burning, salt at the end of ten minutes, and let simmer until tender. Season with butter.
Pork may be boiled with the beans if desired. Boil a quarter of a pound for five hours; then add the beans.
A method rather than a formula: the amounts are left to the cook, and the two versions given (quick buttered beans, or beans finished in pork broth) are really separate dishes. Read the water instruction first, because it is the hinge.
- "Just enough boiling water"This is a shallow braise, not a pot of boiling water. An inch or less in a heavy pan with the lid on, checked once or twice so it does not dry out, keeps the flavor in the beans rather than in the pot liquor you pour away.
- Stringing is now optionalNearly all supermarket green beans are stringless varieties; the tough fibre the recipe warns about is gone. Snap off the stem end and leave the rest alone.
- Cooking timeThe original expects tender, fully softened beans, well past ten minutes. Modern beans reach bright, tender-crisp in 5 to 8 minutes; if you want the long-cooked texture the recipe assumes, give them 25 to 40 minutes and accept the olive-drab color as part of the dish.
- Salting at the end of ten minutesThe recipe gives no reason for the delay; it may reflect the old idea that early salt toughens the skins. In practice it makes little difference, and salting at the start seasons the beans more evenly.
- The pork"Pork" here most likely means salt pork or a piece of smoked side meat rather than fresh loin, though the recipe does not say. Five hours of simmering is for the meat alone, to build the broth and render it soft; the beans go in only at the end. A ham hock will do much the same job in roughly two hours.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given. A pound to a pound and a half of beans with a tablespoon or two of butter serves four; the quarter pound of pork is the only amount the recipe names.
- FinishingButter alone is the whole seasoning in the plain version, so add it off the heat with a little of the remaining cooking liquid and black pepper. With the pork version the broth is already salty and the butter can be skipped.
Green beans are a New World crop, a form of Phaseolus vulgaris domesticated in Mesoamerica and South America and eaten in the pod rather than dried. The insistence on stringing them dates the recipe: the fibrous seam along the pod was standard until stringless bush varieties were developed and popularized in the 1890s, work generally credited to the New York seedsman Calvin Keeney, after which the name "string bean" outlived the string itself. The alternative of simmering the pods with a piece of salt pork reflects long-standing American practice, strongest in the South, where a small quantity of cured pork functioned as both seasoning and fat for a whole pot of vegetables. Mrs. Fryer gives both treatments on one leaf, with no amounts at all.