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Broad Beans in Sauce
Take your shelled beans, very young and tender. Throw them into boiling water for a minute, then pour the water away. Heat for a pound of beans one and one-half pints of milk, stir in four ounces of salt butter, a very little chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Do not let the milk boil, but when it simmers put in the beans. When they have been heated for ten minutes, thicken your sauce with the yolks of two eggs and a tablespoonful of cream. Take out a bean and eat it to see if it is cooked, and if so, pour all on a hot dish. Garnish with fried sippets of bread. Old broad beans can be treated in the same way, but they must first be skinned.
A gentle milk-and-egg braise for fresh fava beans, from a wartime collection of Belgian home cooking. The whole thing hinges on keeping the milk below a simmer once the yolks go in.
- The hinge: the yolks must not boilOnce the two yolks and the cream go into the pan, the milk cannot be allowed to bubble or it will curdle into sweet scrambled egg. Slacken the yolks with a ladleful of the hot milk first, stir them back in off the heat, and return the pan to the lowest flame only until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Broad beans are fava beansA pound of shelled beans is roughly three pounds in the pod. Frozen shelled favas work and need only five or six minutes in the milk rather than ten.
- The pint is ambiguousThe book was published in London in 1915, so one and a half imperial pints is 30 imperial fl oz, a little over 3½ US cups. If you use US pints you get 3 cups, which is closer to a manageable amount of sauce for a pound of beans; either will work, the larger quantity simply gives you more to spoon over.
- Salt butter, four ouncesThat is one US stick. The recipe calls for salt in addition to the salt butter, so taste the sauce before adding any more.
- The blanch is a shock, not a cookingA minute in boiling water and the water poured off is there to set the colour and take the raw edge away. Do not extend it; the beans finish in the milk.
- Skinning older beansFor anything but the youngest pods, blanch two minutes, cool briefly, and pinch each bean out of its grey jacket. This is tedious and entirely worth it — the skins on mature favas are leathery and faintly bitter.
- SippetsSmall triangles or dice of bread fried in butter until crisp, scattered over at the last moment. Cut them thin and fry them while the beans heat, or they will soften in the sauce.
- YieldA pound of shelled beans serves four as a side dish, or two as a light supper with bread. The leftover sauce will thicken further and does not reheat gracefully.
The Belgian Cook Book was published in 1915, compiled from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion — which is why so many of its dishes read as remembered household cooking rather than restaurant instruction. Broad beans have long been a staple of the Low Countries, one of the few protein-rich crops that thrived there before the American bean arrived, and butter, milk and a herb is a common northern European treatment; Flemish cooks often use savory in place of the parsley called for here. The egg-yolk liaison finished off the heat is a straightforward piece of French technique, and the fried sippets are an English convention, which may reflect the book's English-language audience.