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String Beans (Remove strings and snap or cut)
Remove strings, and snap or cut in one-inch pieces; wash, and cook in boiling water from one to three hours, adding salt last half-hour of cooking. Drain, season with butter and salt.
A one-line method that hinges entirely on a cooking time no modern cook would accept. The beans of 1896 were stringy, mature field varieties; today's are picked young and thin-walled.
- The cooking timeOne to three hours will reduce modern string beans to olive-drab mush. Boil young beans in well-salted water 5 to 8 minutes, until they bend but still snap; broader, older beans may want 10 to 12.
- Salt at the start, not the endFarmer holds salt back until the last half-hour; she gives no reason for it, though salt was widely held to toughen skins and slow softening, a plausible worry with tough mature pods. With tender beans, salt the water generously from the beginning so they season through.
- "Remove strings"Most beans sold now are stringless; the fibrous seam that had to be pulled from stem to tip is bred out. Snapping off the stem end is usually all that is needed, and the tail can stay.
- Plenty of water, uncoveredUse a wide pan and a generous volume of boiling water so the beans do not drop the temperature, and leave the lid off. Trapped acids dull the green, which is part of why long-boiled beans in old books came out khaki.
- Draining and seasoningDrain well and toss with butter while hot so it coats rather than pools. If they are not going straight to the table, spread them out or shock in cold water, or residual heat will carry them past the point you stopped at.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon about 1 1/2 lb of beans and 2 tablespoons of butter for six servings.
String beans — the common American name for the immature pods of Phaseolus vulgaris, eaten pod and all — appear in this book at the moment their name was starting to go out of date. The stringless bush bean was being actively selected by American seed houses in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and its commercial introduction came in the mid-1890s, around the time Fannie Farmer was teaching at the Boston Cooking School; the eventual displacement of "string bean" by "green bean" is often attributed to that change, though stringless varieties were barely on the market in 1896. The instruction to boil one to three hours is not necessarily carelessness but may reflect the vegetable as it then reached city kitchens: picked at whatever size, shipped by rail or wagon. The habit long outlived the necessity, and long-cooked beans stayed standard in much of American home cooking well into the twentieth century.