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Red Haricots
Soak some white haricot-beans over night, or stew them till tender in some weak stock. Make a tomato sauce in a saucepan, and flavor it rather strongly with made mustard, stirring well, so that it is well incorporated. When the beans are tender, drain them from the liquor (keeping them hot) and reduce that to half its quantity. Put back the beans and add the tomato sauce, heat for a couple of minutes, and serve with three-cornered pieces of toast.
A plain dish of white beans in mustardy tomato sauce — the "red" of the title comes from the sauce, not from the beans. The instructions telescope two steps into one sentence, so read them in order before starting.
- Read the first line as two stepsSoak the dried beans overnight and then stew them until tender in weak stock. The "or" may instead be offering the stewing as an alternative to soaking; unsoaked dried beans will still cook, but need considerably longer. Figure on 8 hours' soaking and 45-90 minutes' simmering, depending on the age of the beans.
- Haricot-beansAny dried white bean: navy, cannellini or the flat Belgian-style haricot. About 1 lb dried (2 1/2 cups) is a sensible batch and will serve four to six as a side.
- Weak stockA light, unsalted or lightly salted broth; half stock, half water is one reasonable reading. Salt towards the end of cooking if you prefer, but the old rule that early salting toughens the skins is traditional advice rather than established fact; very hard water can keep beans firm.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from the jar, not dry mustard powder. A Dijon or a sharp Belgian table mustard suits it. Start with a tablespoon in about 2 cups of sauce, whisk it in off the heat, and taste — mustard loses its bite if boiled hard.
- Tomato sauceIn a book of this date this probably means a simple cooked sauce of tomato with a little butter and flour or a spoonful of stock, rather than a long-simmered Italian ragù. Passata cooked down with butter and seasoning does the job in ten minutes.
- Reducing the liquorThis is the step that makes the dish. Boil the bean cooking liquid down by half and stir it into the sauce; it carries the starch that gives the finished beans their body. Keep the drained beans covered and warm meanwhile so they do not dry out.
- Final heatingTwo minutes is right. The beans are already cooked, and further boiling in the sauce breaks their skins and turns the dish to purée.
- Three-cornered toastToast with the crusts trimmed and cut corner to corner into triangles; period cookery often calls such pieces sippets or croûtes. The recipe says only to serve them with the beans. Cut and toast them last so they stay crisp.
The Belgian Cook Book (1915) was compiled during the First World War from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees in England, and it was published in aid of relief work — which may help explain why so many of its dishes are built on dried pulses, stock and bread rather than meat. Haricot beans were long a staple of the Flemish and Walloon kitchen, cheap to store and forgiving to cook, and mustard is used freely in the book's sauces. The name is a cook's shorthand rather than a botanical one — the beans go into the pan white and come out red, and serving something soupy with triangles of toast was a common garnish in cookery of the period.