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Boiled Black Beans
Place the beans in a basin of water and soak for three hours. Then place in a saucepan of water and boil for three hours; take out, drain and place in another saucepan with a few small pieces of bacon a little chutney, mushroom catsup, anchovy sauce and gravy, and cook well for half an hour. Turn out onto a dish, and serve with a garnish of boiled rice.
Oscar gives no quantities at all, which is normal for the Waldorf kitchen notes — the cook was assumed to know the scale of the service. Read it as a method for about 1 lb of dried black turtle beans, which will serve six as a side.
- Soak longer than three hoursThree hours in cold water barely penetrates a dried black bean. Cover by three inches and soak overnight, or use the quick method of a five-minute boil followed by an hour off the heat.
- Three hours of boiling is too long nowA properly soaked black bean is tender in 60 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer; older, longer-stored beans may well have needed more, which may be part of why the direction reads as it does. Three hours at a rolling boil will burst the skins and leave you with a puree.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard boil is what breaks black beans apart and clouds the liquid. Keep the surface just trembling, and skim the grey foam in the first ten minutes.
- Mushroom catsupThis is the thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor of the Victorian storeroom, not tomato ketchup. A tablespoon of mushroom soy or a strong dried-mushroom soaking liquid reduced with a little soy gives the same effect.
- Anchovy sauceA bottled fish condiment of the period, closer to thinned anchovy paste than to modern Worcestershire. A teaspoon of anchovy paste, or two mashed fillets, covers it.
- "Gravy"In a hotel kitchen of this date gravy means brown stock or the strained pan juices from the roast, not a thickened flour sauce. Half a cup of good beef or veal stock is right.
- Salt at the endBetween the bacon, the anchovy and the catsup the dish salts itself during the final half hour. Leave the cooking water unsalted or lightly salted and taste only after the sauce has reduced.
- Suggested proportionsFor 1 lb beans: 4 oz bacon cut in lardons, 2 tablespoons chutney, 1 tablespoon mushroom catsup, 1 teaspoon anchovy paste, 1/2 cup stock. The final half hour should reduce to a glaze that coats the beans rather than a soup.
- The riceRead "garnish of boiled rice" as plain boiled long-grain rice, drained dry and arranged around the beans. Cook it separately and keep it loose.
Black turtle beans reached the American table from the Caribbean and Brazil, and by the 1890s they were familiar in New York hotels chiefly as black bean soup, often said to have been a Delmonico's and Waldorf standby and frequently finished with sherry and hard-boiled egg. This entry is the soup's plainer relative: the same bean treated as a savory vegetable and dressed in the deep, salty, brown-tasting condiments that defined late Victorian hotel cooking up, anchovy sauce and stock, a quartet that appears in Oscar Tschirky's book as a way of giving quick depth without building a fresh sauce. The bean-and-rice pairing is traditionally traced to the Latin American and Caribbean kitchens where black beans were a staple long before they were fashionable uptown, though Oscar presents the rice merely as a garnish rather than as half the dish.