Home › Vegetables › Shell Beans
Shell Beans
Wash, and cook in boiling water from one to one and a half hours, adding salt last half-hour of cooking. Cook in sufficiently small quantity of water, that there may be none left to drain off when beans are cooked. Season with butter and salt.
A bare three-sentence entry that assumes you already know what shell beans are and how much you need. Two of its instructions have since been overturned.
- What "shell beans" meansFresh beans shelled from the pod but not dried: cranberry (borlotti), fava, lima, flageolet, or the fresh horticultural beans common in New England markets in Farmer's day. If you are working from dried beans, this recipe does not apply — they need soaking and a longer, gentler simmer.
- The timing is far too longFresh shell beans are tender in 20 to 40 minutes depending on size and age; favas can be done in 10. An hour and a half turns them to paste. Start tasting at 20 minutes.
- Salt at the start, not the endThe old rule that salt toughens beans has not held up. Salting the cooking water from the beginning seasons the interior and, if anything, helps the skins stay intact. There is no reason to wait for the last half hour.
- The water instruction is the useful oneCooking in just enough water that none needs draining keeps the starch and flavor in the pot rather than the sink. Barely cover the beans and add small amounts of boiling water only if the pan threatens to go dry.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no yield. As a rough guide, allow around 2 lb of beans in the pod, or about 1 lb shelled, for four servings. Shelling loss varies by variety: cranberry beans lose roughly half, favas considerably more.
- FinishingButter and salt as written, but the small amount of starchy liquid left in the pan will emulsify with the butter if you swirl the pan off the heat. Pepper, and savory if you have it, are worth considering, though the recipe calls for neither.
Shell beans occupy a category that has largely disappeared from American supermarkets: the bean picked at the stage between snap bean and dried bean, when the seeds are full-sized but still soft and the pod has gone papery. In the Northeast of the period these were a late-summer staple, and a cookbook could assume its readers knew them without explanation — which is why the entry gives no yield and no description. The instruction to add salt only in the final half hour reflects a belief, common in nineteenth-century cookery writing and repeated well into the twentieth, that salt hardened the skins of legumes; later testing has found the opposite, and the long boil recommended here may owe more to tough, older market beans than to anything picked at its proper moment.