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Butter Beans
With a knife cut off the ends of pods and strings from both sides, being very careful to remove every shred; cut every bean lengthwise, in two or three strips, and leave them for half an hour in cold water. Much more than cover them with boiling water; boil till perfectly tender. It is well to allow three hours for boiling. Drain well, return to kettle, and add a dressing of half a gill cream, one and a half ounces butter, one even tea-spoon salt, and half a tea-spoon pepper. This is sufficient for a quart of cooked beans.
A dressing recipe more than a cooking one — the seasoning proportions are still sound, but the boiling time belongs to another era of beans.
- Ignore the three hoursModern snap and wax beans are bred tender and are picked young; they are done in 5 to 10 minutes of boiling, and lima pods shelled out cook in 20 to 30. A three-hour boil suited tougher, more mature pods than we usually buy now; applied today it produces olive-grey mush.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. Heavy cream will hold together when it hits the hot beans; half-and-half may break.
- One and a half ounces butterThree tablespoons. With the quarter cup of cream this dresses a quart of cooked beans, roughly four to six servings as a side.
- The stringingThe insistence on removing "every shred" dates the recipe — stringless varieties were not yet standard. Most beans sold now need only the stem end snapped off.
- Cutting lengthwiseSplitting each pod into strips is what is now called the French cut. With today's short cooking it is largely a matter of appearance.
- The half-hour soakCold water crisps limp pods and helps them hold shape, which is worth doing with beans that have sat a few days. Fresh-picked beans do not need it.
- SaltingA teaspoon of salt goes into the dressing, not the cooking water. Salting the boiling water as well seasons the beans from the inside; taste before adding the full teaspoon at the end.
- "Much more than cover"A generous volume of water keeps the temperature from dropping when the beans go in, which matters for colour. Drain thoroughly before dressing or the cream will thin into a puddle.
"Butter bean" has never been a precise term. Across much of the South it means a lima, particularly the small pale-green sieva type, but it has also been attached to yellow wax beans and to any bean eaten pod and all with butter heir, their pods and their lengthwise splitting, plainly describe a snap bean rather than a shelled lima. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s and generally understood to share and adapt material with the widely circulated Buckeye Cookery, is full of this kind of vegetable entry: a long boil, a drain, and a dressing of cream and butter added at the end. The three hours is the tell. Before the stringless bush beans of the late nineteenth century became widespread, pods were often picked mature and tough, and cooks are generally said to have boiled them into submission rather than aiming for the bright, squeaky texture we now expect.