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String Bean Soup
4 cups White Stock I, II, or III 2 quarts string beans 2 cups scalded milk 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup butter Salt and pepper Cook beans until soft in boiling salted water to cover; drain, and rub through sieve. Add pulp to White Stock, , and rub through sieve. Add pulp to White Stock, then milk; bind, and season with salt and pepper. Garnish with Fritter Beans.
A plain purée soup from Fannie Farmer's school: vegetable pulp, white stock, milk, and a butter-flour binding. The transcription repeats a phrase mid-sentence, a typesetting slip in the original — read it as "rub through sieve, add pulp to White Stock, then milk."
- "Bind" means a rouxThe 1/4 cup butter and 1/4 cup flour are not stray ingredients; they are cooked together into a white roux and whisked into the hot soup, then simmered a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Farmer uses "bind" in this sense in her purée soups.
- 2 quarts of string beansBeans were measured by volume, cut or whole. Two quarts of trimmed, cut green beans is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb — enough that the sieved pulp carries the soup.
- White StockFarmer's White Stock I, II and III are veal and/or chicken stocks, unbrowned, so the soup stays pale. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark beef stock, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Cooking time for the beans"Until soft" here means soft enough to sieve, which is well past modern tender-crisp. Expect 15 to 20 minutes. This is one of the few cases where overcooking green beans is the point, though the colour will go olive — a blender or food mill gets you there faster and with less loss than a sieve.
- Scalded milkBringing the milk just to the point of steaming is usually explained as a dairy habit from before pasteurisation was general. With modern milk it serves mainly to keep the soup from dropping in temperature; add it warm and off a hard boil so it does not curdle against the stock.
- SievingPush the pulp through a medium sieve and discard the strings and skins left behind. Skipping this step leaves a fibrous soup — the strings in "string bean" were real in 1896, before stringless cultivars became standard.
- Fritter BeansFarmer's garnish is a stiff batter forced through a colander into hot fat, frying into small bean-shaped puffs. Fried croutons or a spoonful of crisp bacon serve the same purpose if you are not making them.
- Yield4 cups stock and 2 cups milk plus the sieved bean pulp give roughly 7 to 8 cups, serving six to eight as a first course. Season at the end: the beans are cooked in salted water and the stock may already be salty.
Purée soups like this one are the backbone of the soup chapter in *The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book* (1896), and they show the book's method plainly: a neutral white stock, a vegetable reduced to pulp, milk for body, and a measured roux to bind — the same skeleton reused for asparagus, celery, pea and squash. Fannie Farmer's contribution to American cooking was largely this insistence on standard measure and repeatable structure, and a soup built from a formula rather than a taste memory is the argument in miniature. The garnish is worth noticing too: nineteenth-century table practice liked a soup to echo itself, so a bean soup arrived under little fried batter puffs shaped like beans, in the same spirit that a mock turtle soup was garnished with forcemeat balls. Green beans themselves were still genuinely stringy at this date, which is why the sieve is not optional in the original.