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String Beans
String, snap and wash two quarts beans, boil in plenty of water about fifteen minutes, drain off and put on again in about two quarts boiling water; boil an hour and a half, and add salt and pepper just before taking up, stirring in one and a half table-spoons butter rubbed into two table-spoons flour and half pint sweet cream. Or, boil a piece of salted pork one hour, then add beans and boil an hour and a half. For shelled beans boil half an hour in water enough to cover, and dress as above.
A Southern treatment of snap beans, given with three variations: cream-finished, cooked with salt pork, or the same dressing applied to shell beans. The timings belong to a different bean than the one you will buy.
- The hinge: cooking timeAn hour and a half will reduce modern stringless beans to olive-drab mush. Fresh green beans today need 6-10 minutes to stay crisp, or 25-40 minutes if you want the soft, deeply cooked Southern texture the recipe is aiming at. Taste rather than time them.
- Two quarts of beansRoughly 2 to 2½ lb; the recipe does not make clear whether the measure is taken before or after snapping. Serves six to eight as a side.
- The first boilBlanching for fifteen minutes and discarding the water was probably meant to draw off strong flavour from older, tougher pods. With today's beans it accomplishes little except loss of colour and vitamin C; a single cooking is enough.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh cream, as opposed to soured. Use heavy or whipping cream. Half a pint is one cup, which is generous for 2 lb of beans.
- Butter rubbed into flourThis is a beurre manié: 1½ tablespoons soft butter kneaded with 2 tablespoons flour, stirred into the hot liquid in small pieces. It needs two or three minutes at a simmer to lose its raw-flour taste.
- Salted porkA piece of salt pork or streaky bacon, boiled an hour first to render and flavour the water. Salt the beans only at the end, if at all, since the pork liquor is already salty. The recipe does not say whether the cream dressing belongs with the pork version; it reads as an alternative finish.
- Shelled beansFresh shell beans of the period meant limas, butter beans or cranberry beans taken from the pod. Half an hour is realistic for these; dried beans are a different matter and need soaking and longer cooking.
The long cooking here is not carelessness but an accurate response to the beans of the 1880s, which were genuinely tough and, as the first word of the recipe records, genuinely stringy: the cook had to pull a fibrous seam from each pod before it went in the pot. The stringless snap bean is generally credited to Calvin Keeney of New York, whose work reached gardeners through seed catalogues in the 1890s. The Dixie Cook Book, a Southern-market companion to the Ohio-published Buckeye Cookery family, offers all three finishes side by side without comment, perhaps because a household would choose according to what was on hand: cream if there was a cow, salt pork if there was a barrel in the cellar. The pork variation is often said to be the one that became the standard Southern green bean, cooked slack and soft and served with its liquor.