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String Beans Spanish
1 Pound String Beans 3 Eggs Tomato Sauce Boil beans until tender and allow to cool. Beat the white of eggs until thick; put in the yellow and beat five minutes more. Roll six or eight beans at a time in the egg, fry and serve with the sauce.
A fritter recipe in disguise: cooked beans are bundled, coated in a whipped-egg batter and fried, then sauced. The original assumes you know how to handle an egg foam and a deep pan of fat.
- The hinge is the egg coatingWhipped whites folded with yolks make a light, unstable batter with no flour to hold it. Beat the whites to firm peaks, beat in the yolks only until combined rather than the full five minutes, and fry immediately — the foam begins to weep within a few minutes of standing.
- Dry the beansBeans boiled and cooled will be wet, and the egg will slide off. Drain them well and pat them thoroughly dry before coating.
- Boil until tenderIn cookbooks of this period that generally meant a long boil; 5–7 minutes in salted water leaves them tender but intact, which matters because limp beans will not hold together as a bundle.
- Frying medium and temperatureThe book does not say how much fat or how hot. Shallow-fry in about half an inch of neutral oil at 350–360°F; the coating sets in roughly a minute a side and should be pale gold, not brown.
- Holding the bundlesSix or eight beans lifted together on a fork and lowered into the fat will fuse as the egg sets. Do not crowd the pan — the temperature drops and the coating absorbs oil.
- Tomato sauceNo recipe is given, and none is needed: a plain simmered tomato sauce, lightly seasoned, served warm underneath or alongside. Some books of this era mean by "tomato sauce" a thickened, French-influenced sauce, but a simple one suits better here.
- YieldA pound of beans makes roughly 15–20 bundles, enough as a side dish for about four.
Vegetables coated in beaten egg and fried, then napped with a tomato sauce, are a fixture of Spanish and Latin American home cooking — the same technique that produces chiles rellenos and fried green-bean or cauliflower rebozados. American cookbooks of the early twentieth century used "Spanish" loosely, as a label for almost anything involving tomatoes, peppers or onions, so its appearance here says less about Spain than about the period's appetite for lightly exotic names on the vegetable page. The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a genre aimed at newly married women setting up a first kitchen, where the goal was to make a cheap and plentiful ingredient — string beans were among the commonest garden and market vegetables of the season — look like a course worth serving to guests. The instructions assume skills the reader was expected to already have, which is why the sauce goes unexplained and the frying fat is never mentioned at all.