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White-Bean Salad
Toss one pint of white beans, cooked, with one tablespoonful of vinegar and three tablespoonfuls of oil, a little salt and a dash of cayenne or paprica. Arrange in a mound on a bed of shredded lettuce, and sprinkle with chives, parsley and pimentos, all finely chopped. Finish the top of the salad with a large pim-ola.
A plain vinaigrette bean salad that depends entirely on the beans being well cooked and generously seasoned. Two details need translation: the measure and the garnish.
- A pint of beansThat is two cups of cooked, drained beans, measured after cooking, not a pint of dry ones. Around three-quarters of a cup of dried navy, cannellini or Great Northern beans will get you there; two cups from a can works as well, rinsed and drained.
- Dress them warmWorth doing, though the recipe says nothing either way. Beans take up vinegar and oil more readily while still hot from the pot; dressed cold, more of the seasoning sits on the outside. Toss immediately after draining and let them cool in the dressing.
- The three-to-one ratioOne tablespoon vinegar to three of oil is a standard vinaigrette proportion and is on the mild side for beans, which swallow acid. Taste after the beans have cooled and add more vinegar and salt then rather than at the start.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. In American cookbooks of this period it generally meant sweet paprika rather than the smoked Spanish kind, which will taste noticeably different if you substitute it.
- PimentosSweet red peppers preserved in brine, sold then in tins and now in jars as pimiento or roasted red pepper. Drain and pat them dry before chopping or they will thin the dressing.
- Pim-olaA pimento-stuffed green olive; Pimola was a trade name of the period that became a generic term in cookbooks. Any large stuffed queen olive does the job.
- YieldThe recipe gives no figure; a pint of beans makes roughly four small side salads, or two as a lunch dish. It will hold a day in the refrigerator, with the lettuce shredded and added only at serving.
This comes from the era when American cookbooks were absorbing Spanish-style preserved peppers and olives into everyday salads. Canned pimientos and pimento-stuffed olives were imported in quantity around the turn of the twentieth century, and a domestic pimiento-growing industry took hold in Georgia in the early twentieth century. The dish itself belongs to a broad family of dressed legume salads that run through European cooking wherever beans are cheap and oil is available; what marks this version as American and of its moment is the arrangement -- a mound on shredded lettuce, finished with a single olive set on top, in the composed, faintly decorative style that salad chapters of the day favored.