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White Beans and Cream
Put a few mashed boiled onions in a saucepan with a little butter, grated nutmeg, salt and pepper; add the beans, stirring gently over the fire until they are hot but without boiling; they are then ready for serving.
A finishing recipe rather than a whole one: Oscar assumes you already have a pot of cooked white beans and boiled onions on hand, and gives only the last two minutes. A few things need filling in.
- The missing creamThe title promises cream and the instructions never mention it; either a line has dropped out or it was taken as understood. Cream is presumably added with the butter and warmed only to steaming. As a modern starting point, roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup cream per pound of cooked beans, adjusted to taste.
- The beansDried white beans — navy, cannellini or marrow — simmered until fully tender and drained; canned beans are softer and more likely to break up. Reckon about 2 1/2 to 3 cups cooked beans (roughly half a pound dried) for four to six as a side.
- Why it must not boilThe recipe is explicit: hot but not boiling. Hard heat risks breaking up the beans and overcooking the cream, and the point is intact beans in a barely-thickened coating. Keep the pan over low heat and stop as soon as steam rises.
- OnionsBoil the onions whole until soft and mash them smooth for sweetness without raw bite; "a few" suggests two or three small to medium ones, scaled to the quantity of beans.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and keep it to a few passes over the pan. Pre-ground nutmeg is flat and, used in the quantity you would need to taste it, turns medicinal.
- StirringUse a wooden spoon or fold with a rubber spatula rather than beating. "Stirring gently" is a real instruction here, not politeness.
- ServingWould suit roast lamb, mutton or game. It is best warmed at the last moment and sent straight to the table.
Beans dressed with butter, cream and nutmeg belong to the French repertoire of purées and garnitures that Oscar Tschirky drew on for the Waldorf's tables in the 1890s, where a plain white bean was legitimised by the cream and the grating of nutmeg. Nutmeg with beans and onions looks odd to modern eyes but appears often enough in nineteenth-century French and Anglo-American vegetable cookery, and is sometimes traced to an older habit of spicing legumes and root vegetables warmly rather than with herbs. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the Oscar book generally: a volume whose authorship is itself contested — Tschirky was maître d'hôtel rather than chef — and which was marketed to domestic as well as professional readers, it records the final gesture and leaves the groundwork unsaid.