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String Beans with Gravy
Put some string beans which have been cooked and allowed to become quite cold into a saucepan with a little chopped parsley and onions fried in butter, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper, and toss over the fire for about ten minutes. Then pour in sufficient stock and gravy from roasted meat to moisten and cook gently for fifteen minutes; skim off the beans and place on a dish, add the yolks of two or three eggs to the gravy to thicken it and pour over the beans, serving them hot.
String Beans with Parsley and Butter Place a good-sized lump of butter in a saucepan, sprinkle in a few green parsley leaves, add the beans, then stir until the butter is melted, the beans coated with it and the parsley is equally spread over them. Cover the pan over and place on side of the fire, cook for twenty minutes, and serve. White Beans and boiled Pork Select a suitable piece of pork, score the skin and boil for half an hour. For each pound of meat, take one quart of beans that have been soaked over night in soft water. Place them in cold water on the stove to boil, and when they become soft, drain off the water and set the pork in a deep dish on a layer of the beans, covering it nearly over with the remainder; and add a little warm water; then bake to a nice brown. A little moist sugar mixed with beans before placing them in the dish is considered an improvement by some.
Three bean dishes run together in a single block here, in the compressed style Oscar used for kitchen staff who already knew the work. The only genuinely delicate step is the egg-yolk liaison in the first recipe.
- The hinge: the yolksTwo or three yolks stirred into hot gravy will scramble if the pan goes back over direct heat. Take the pan off the fire, temper the yolks with a ladle of the hot gravy first, then return the mixture to the pan and keep it below about 180F until it coats a spoon.
- "Toss over the fire"Medium heat in a wide saucepan or skillet, shaking rather than stirring so the cold beans warm through without breaking up. Ten minutes is for beans already fully cooked and chilled.
- Cooking times and colourFifteen minutes in stock, or twenty in butter, will take already-cooked beans well past bright green and soft; long-cooked vegetables were common in period cookery. If you want them bright and with some bite, blanch until just tender, shock in ice water, and cut the reheating to three or four minutes in each recipe.
- Gravy from roasted meatThe first dish depends on pan drippings from a roast plus stock. Without them, use a well-reduced brown stock; a thin canned broth will not carry the yolks.
- "Side of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler edge of the top. Translate as low heat, covered, so the butter stays emulsified and does not brown.
- Bean quantity in the pork dishOne quart of dried beans per pound of pork is roughly two pounds of beans to a pound of meat, and once soaked and cooked they will swell to something like two to three times that volume. (The text is ambiguous as to whether the quart is measured dry or after soaking.) For a modern household, half a pound of dried beans per pound of pork gives the same effect in a manageable casserole.
- Soft water and soakingSoft water means water low in dissolved minerals; hard water slows the softening of bean skins. Overnight soaking still helps, and salting the soak or cooking water is fine, contrary to older advice.
- "Moist sugar" and the ovenMoist sugar is unrefined brown sugar; a tablespoon or two is enough. The recipe gives no oven setting at all; "bake to a nice brown" would be served by a slow oven, around 325F, for an hour or more uncovered until the top crusts. Pork boiled thirty minutes and then baked for that long should finish well past a safe internal temperature.
- YieldNone of the three gives a number. As a rough estimate, the buttered beans and the gravied beans would each serve about four; the pork and beans, scaled as above, about six.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book was assembled as a working reference rather than a set of party pieces, and its vegetable chapters read accordingly: variations stacked one after another so a cook could pick whichever matched the day's leftovers. All three of these lean on that logic. The first is a plain French pattern, beans reheated in the roast's own gravy and bound with yolks, a liaison that predates flour-thickened sauces and was still standard in professional kitchens of the 1890s. The last is baked pork and beans in an older, wetter form — often associated with New England, though the recipe names no region — boiled first and finished in the oven rather than buried all day in a bean pot. The suggestion of "a little moist sugar" marks the point where American taste was pulling the dish toward the molasses-sweetened version already sold in cans by the mid-1890s; Oscar offers it as something "considered an improvement by some."