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String Bean Salad
String beans, lettuce, water cress, French dressing. Select small, tender beans of uniform size, not more than three inches long. String and wash in cold water. Then cook in boiling, salted water, uncovered, and rapidly for fifteen minutes. When they are tender turn out into a colander and rinse in cold water. Let them dry, and put into the ice chest until ready. Macerate them with a French dressing. Arrange a bed of crisp, light colored lettuce leaves in the salad bowl, then a layer of water cress just inside the lettuce, then stack the beans in the center.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and the whole thing hinges on how the beans are cooked and chilled. Two words in the text mean something different now than they did when it was written.
- "French dressing" is a vinaigretteIn this period the term meant oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet, orange bottled dressing that later took the name in the United States.
- "Macerate" means marinateDress the cold, dry beans and let them sit in the vinaigrette for 20-30 minutes before building the salad.
- Fifteen minutes is too longBeans of that size are done in 4 to 6 minutes in heavily salted, rapidly boiling water. Fifteen minutes gives the olive-drab, collapsing bean that was the period standard; test one at four minutes and pull them while they still snap.
- Uncovered, and lots of waterThis instruction is worth keeping. An open pot is traditionally said to let volatile acids escape, and a large volume of water returns to the boil quickly; both are held to help preserve the green colour.
- Rinse means shock"Rinse in cold water" is doing the job of an ice bath. Drop the drained beans straight into ice water, then spread them on a towel to dry completely, or the dressing will slide off.
- Ice chestAn icebox, cooled with block ice; a refrigerator does the same job. The beans can be cooked, shocked and chilled several hours ahead.
- WatercressSold in bunches with thick stems; pick off the tender sprigs and discard the coarse lower stalks. It wilts quickly once dressed, so assemble the bowl at the last moment.
- YieldAbout a pound of beans with a head of lettuce and a bunch of cress serves four as a first course.
String beans earned the name honestly: until the breeding work of the late nineteenth century that produced stringless varieties — Burpee's Stringless Green Pod reached the market in 1894 — the fibrous seam along each pod had to be pulled off by hand, which is why the recipe specifies stringing before washing. Salad books of this era treated the vegetable salad as an architectural exercise — note that the beans are stacked in the centre rather than tossed, and the pale lettuce and dark cress form deliberate concentric rings. The insistence on small, uniform pods of no more than three inches reflects a market where beans were bought loose and graded by eye, and the whole method — boil hard, shock cold, dress, chill — is essentially the classical French treatment of haricots verts, softened only by the long cooking time that American kitchens of the period considered proper for any green vegetable.