Bean Salad
Mix following salad dressing with cold cooked beans: 1 cup of sour cream, 1 cup of vinegar, 2/3 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon butter or olive oil, 1 teaspoon flour. Boil vinegar, sugar and butter; beat egg, cream and flour together, and add to the mixture while on the stove, and boil 5 minutes. Before removing from stove, add 1 teaspoon each of salt, pepper and mustard. This dressing will keep indefinitely.
A boiled sour-cream dressing of the German-American type, poured over cold beans. The ingredient list and the method do not agree, so read both before starting.
- The missing eggThe method calls for beating an egg with the cream and flour, but no egg appears in the list. One egg is the standard proportion for a boiled dressing of this size; without it the dressing will be thin and will taste mostly of vinegar.
- Sour cream then and nowIn a book of this vintage sour cream usually means sweet cream that has soured naturally, thinner and sharper than tubbed cultured sour cream. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream works, though it thickens more; crème fraîche is closer in fat and behaviour and is less likely to break.
- Vinegar strengthA cup of vinegar to a cup of cream is aggressive by current taste, and household vinegar of the period was less standardised than today's 5 percent cider vinegar, so its strength could run either side of it. Cut the vinegar with water, or reduce the sugar, only after tasting the boiled base.
- Which beansThe recipe says only 'cold cooked beans'; either cooked and cut green string beans or cooked dried navy or kidney beans would suit. Two to three cups of drained cooked beans seems about right for this volume of dressing.
- Keeping the dressing from breakingBoiling cream and vinegar together for five minutes invites curdling, and the single teaspoon of flour offers little protection. Beat the flour smooth into the cream and egg with no lumps, add it to the hot vinegar in a slow stream while whisking, and hold it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil.
- MustardA teaspoon of mustard here is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. A teaspoon of black pepper is also a great deal by modern seasoning; add half and taste.
- "Will keep indefinitely"It will not. This is a cooked egg and dairy preparation and belongs in the refrigerator, used within about a week.
- YieldRoughly two and a half cups of dressing, more than enough to coat three cups of beans with some left over. The salad is better after an hour or two in the cold, once the beans have taken up the dressing.
Boiled dressings like this one — vinegar, sugar, a little fat, thickened with flour and egg and finished with cream — were a common everyday salad dressing in the American Midwest and in Pennsylvania German kitchens well into the twentieth century, before bottled mayonnaise was widely available. They suited a household with its own cream and eggs and little refrigeration: the cooking set the egg, and the sugar and vinegar carried the flavour. The sweet-sour balance, and the habit of dressing cooked beans rather than raw greens, is characteristic of the German settlement cooking that fills many community cookbooks of the period, where similar dressings were used on potatoes, cabbage, cucumbers and lettuce as the season allowed.