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String Bean Salad
The string beans are to be boiled, cut up into diamond-shaped pieces and allowed to cool and drain well; mix them up with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar and a little ravigote sauce, turn the salad into a croustade made of paste, and serve cold.
A short entry that assumes a professional pantry: it expects you already have cooked beans, a vinaigrette and a jar of ravigote on hand, plus a baked pastry case to put them in. Two things decide whether it works — how long the beans cook, and how late you fill the croustade.
- Cook the beans briefly, then chill them fastThe entry says only "boiled" and gives no time; period cooking generally took green vegetables further than we would. Salted boiling water for 4 to 6 minutes, until they bend but still snap, then straight into ice water fixes both the colour and the texture. Beyond that they turn olive-drab and limp.
- Diamond-shaped piecesThis reads as the lozenge cut: lay the beans in a bundle and slice on a steep diagonal, about half an inch along the bias. Broader, coarser beans take the cut better than slim modern haricots verts, which are best left whole or halved on the bias.
- Ravigote sauceIn a book of this vintage, ravigote usually means the cold version — a sharp vinaigrette worked up with finely chopped shallot, capers and the green herbs (chervil, tarragon, chives, parsley), sometimes with a little mustard. Use a spoonful or two as a seasoning here, not as a coating; the beans are already dressed with oil and vinegar.
- Oil and vinegar proportionsNone are given. Three parts oil to one of vinegar is a safe default. The recipe has you cool and drain the beans before dressing them, so season after they are cold and taste again then, when seasoning tends to read flatter.
- "Drain well" is the hingeWet beans dilute the dressing and, worse, soak the pastry. Spread them on a towel after their ice bath and pat dry before mixing.
- A croustade made of pasteA baked shell of short or puff pastry — effectively a blind-baked tart case or vol-au-vent, not the fried bread croustade sometimes given the same name. Bake it fully, cool it completely, and fill it no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before serving or the base goes soft.
- Oven for the shellIf you are blind-baking pastry for the case, 400F with weights until set, then 350F to dry out the base. The original assumes the pastry cook has already done this.
- YieldAbout a pound of beans dresses generously and fills one 9-inch case or six small ones — four to six servings as a first course or side salad.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection often reads like a working reference for a large hotel brigade, which may be why entries like this one are three lines long: the reader is presumed to know how a croustade is built and what goes into ravigote. The dish belongs to the late-nineteenth-century vogue for cold composed vegetable salads served in an edible container, a style that let a kitchen assemble portions ahead and present them without a chafing dish. Ravigote — from the French ravigoter, to perk up or invigorate — was codified in French cooking in both a warm velouté-based form and the cold herbed vinaigrette used here, and Escoffier's generation treated it as a standard sauce rather than a flourish. String beans themselves were a summer market vegetable in New York at the time.