Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Boiled String Beans
Boiled String Beans
Take the fresh tender beans, break off the tops and bottoms carefully, stringing both sides, and paring the edges neatly; wash in cold water and drain. Then place them in boiling salted water and cook for twenty minutes. Drain and return them to cold water, letting them get thoroughly cool. Lift out and dry. They are then ready to serve.
String Beans, Bretonne Cut some onions into dice-shaped pieces placing them in a saucepan together with a little butter, let cook to a golden color on the stove, say for five minutes, and add a very little flour. Stir well and moisten with some white broth, continuing the stirring until it comes to a boil, season with salt and pepper. Then add the cooked beans with a clove of crushed garlic to the sauce, cook for ten minutes, place on a hot dish, sprinkling over it a little chopped parsley, and serve.
String Beans, English Style Prepare the beans in the same manner as for the boiled string beans, keep them warm and of a light green color, put on a hot dish, pouring over them a little melted butter, and sprinkle some chopped parsley on top, serving very hot.
Three preparations in one entry: a plain boil that doubles as the base for the other two, an onion-and-stock braise, and a butter-and-parsley finish. The only real problem is the cooking time.
- Twenty minutes is too longOlder pod varieties were often picked larger and coarser than what you buy now. Modern haricots verts want 2-3 minutes in boiling water, standard green beans 4-6, tested by biting one. Twenty minutes gives you olive-drab and limp.
- StringingNearly all supermarket green beans are stringless varieties; you only need to snap off the stem end. The instruction to string both sides and pare the edges belongs to older varieties that genuinely had strings.
- Salting and the cold waterSalt the water heavily, about a tablespoon per quart. The plunge into cold water after draining is a proper refresh: it stops the cooking and fixes the green. Ice water works faster than cold tap water, and drying them well matters if they are going into butter afterwards.
- White brothA light, unbrowned stock — veal or chicken, unseasoned. Low-sodium chicken stock stands in. The butter, onion, flour and stock in the Bretonne are a small blond roux sauce; keep the flour to a scant teaspoon or two so it stays a coating, not a paste.
- The garlicOne crushed clove for a whole dish of beans is a background note, not a flavour. The recipe specifies crushed rather than chopped, so keep it coarse.
- Second cooking in the BretonneThe beans have already been boiled and chilled. Ten more minutes in the sauce will overcook beans blanched to modern doneness — three or four minutes is enough to heat them through and let them take up the sauce.
- English style needs reheatingAs written the beans have been cooled in cold water, so "keep them warm" only makes sense if you skip the refresh or reheat them. Warm them briefly in the melted butter in a pan rather than pouring butter over cold beans.
- YieldNone is given. Reckon on 1 lb of beans for four as a side dish, with roughly 2 tablespoons butter for the English style and one medium onion for the Bretonne.
Green beans reached European kitchens from the Americas and were long grown for the dried seed; eating the whole immature pod is the later refinement, and the fussy stringing and edge-paring here reflect varieties that genuinely needed it. "Bretonne" in classical French cookery generally signals onion, and as a garnish more usually indicates white haricot beans. That the third variation is called "English Style" and consists of nothing but butter and parsley is worth noting, as is the pattern it belongs to: the same vegetable offered plain, sauced, or dressed.