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String Beans Sauted in Butter
Take some tender string beans and parboil them in slightly salted water for a couple of minutes, drain them and place in a saucepan on a hot stove, adding a lump of butter and season with salt. Stir lightly with a wooden spoon, while cooking for three minutes. When done, add a little finely-chopped parsley, place on a hot dish, and serve.
A two-step method — brief blanch, then a fast toss in butter — that still reads as current technique. The only real decisions are how long to blanch and how much butter.
- Blanching time"A couple of minutes" assumes very young, thin beans. Modern supermarket beans are usually thicker and need 3-5 minutes in heavily salted boiling water until just tender with a little snap left.
- Salt the water properly"Slightly salted" undersells it. Salt the blanching water like pasta water — roughly a tablespoon per quart — so the beans come out seasoned rather than flat.
- Dry them before the butterThe hinge of the dish. Drained beans carry surface water that will steam rather than fry and will break the butter into a thin puddle. Spread them on a towel for a moment first.
- A lump of butterRead this as 1 to 2 tablespoons for a pound of beans. It is meant to coat, not to pool; if the pan looks wet at the end there was too much.
- "A hot stove"Medium-high heat over gas or induction. Hot enough that the butter foams and browns slightly at the edges, not so hot that it blackens in three minutes.
- Wooden spoonPeriod recipes routinely specify wood. Any spoon, or a shake of the pan, works now.
- ColourIf you blanch ahead, shock the beans in ice water and hold them; without that they dull as they sit. Reheating in the butter takes the same three minutes.
- YieldA pound of trimmed beans serves four as a side.
Oscar Tschirky's book, a compilation assembled by the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel and published in 1896, sets down a large repertoire of dishes. The method behind the vegetables is French, the sauté au beurre, and its virtue in a large brigade was that the slow step could be done in bulk hours in advance while the plate itself took three minutes. String beans got their name from the tough fibre once running along the pod seam, which had to be pulled off before cooking; the stringless varieties that dominate now were bred in the late nineteenth century and were still a novelty when this book appeared, so Oscar's insistence on "tender" beans carried more weight than it does today.