Bean Salad
String young beans, break into half-inch pieces (or leave whole), wash and cook soft in salt water; drain well, add finely-chopped onions, pepper, salt and vinegar; when cool add olive-oil or melted butter. The onions may be omitted.
A plain marinated green-bean salad of the kind that turns up in late nineteenth-century Southern books whenever the beans come in faster than they can be eaten hot. The only real decision is how long you cook the beans.
- "Cook soft" is not modern practiceBeans of the period were tougher, stringier varieties and were cooked far longer than we would now. Modern bush and pole beans want six to eight minutes in boiling salted water, until they bend without snapping, and are better shocked in cold water to hold their colour.
- StringingMost beans sold today have had the string bred out of them. Snap off the stem end and skip the rest; only older heirloom or overgrown pole beans still need the seam pulled.
- Dress warm, oil coolThe recipe puts the vinegar, salt and pepper on the drained beans while they are still hot, and the oil or butter only "when cool". Vinegar is generally held to be taken up better by warm beans, and oil added first tends to coat them. Melted butter added to cold beans, as written, will set into flecks; olive oil is the easier of the two options.
- ProportionsNone are given. For a pound of trimmed beans, roughly three tablespoons vinegar and a third of a cup of oil, with a small onion finely chopped, gives a salad that is dressed rather than pickled. Cider vinegar suits the book's era; white wine vinegar is milder.
- The onionRaw chopped onion in a dressing sharpens as it sits. If the salad is to stand more than an hour, soak the chopped onion in the vinegar for ten minutes first, which knocks back the harshness.
- Yield and keepingA pound of beans serves four as a side. It keeps three or four days refrigerated and improves on the second day, though the beans will dull in colour.
Green beans dressed in oil and vinegar belong to a broad family of "cold vegetable salads" that American cookbooks absorbed from French and German practice through the nineteenth century, and which appear in Southern books as a way of using up a summer glut. The instruction to substitute melted butter for olive oil is suggestive about the period and the region, since good imported oil was expensive and hard to come by inland, while butter was at hand; the swap turns up in other recipes of the era.