No. 2657

String Bean Salad

Salade de Haricots Verts

Have one pound of small string beans; if too large cut them lengthwise in two, and cook them in salted water in an untinned copper vessel; refresh them and drain. Put them into a salad bowl and season with salt and pepper, adding one tablespoonful of vinegar and three of oil.

← No. 2656 Oyster Plant Salad Vegetable Salads — Cooked & Raw No. 2658 White Bean Salad →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A three-line recipe from Ranhofer's Delmonico's kitchen, and nearly all of it is technique rather than ingredients. The only instruction worth arguing with is the pot.

Skip the untinned copperUnlined copper was used because trace copper ions bind to chlorophyll and hold a vivid green, a trick French kitchens relied on for beans and peas. Copper does leach into salted and acidic food, and the practice is no longer recommended; use stainless steel, uncovered, and accept a slightly softer green.
Salted water, generouslyAbout a tablespoon of salt per quart. Beans season from the outside in and the dressing here is only oil and vinegar, so the boiling water is where most of the salt has to land.
Cooking timeThe original gives none. Small beans need 3 to 5 minutes in fast-boiling water, until they bend without snapping. Longer cooking produces olive-drab beans that collapse under dressing.
"Refresh them"Nineteenth-century kitchen shorthand for plunging into cold or iced water to stop the cooking. Drain thoroughly and pat dry afterward, or the water will thin the dressing and slide it off the beans.
Cut lengthwiseSplitting larger beans down their length, French-style, is not decorative: it lets them cook through at the same rate as small whole ones and gives the dressing a cut surface to cling to.
The dressing ratioOne tablespoon vinegar to three of oil is a standard vinaigrette proportion, roughly 1/4 cup total for a pound of beans. Season the beans with salt and pepper first, as written, then add the vinegar and oil; salt dissolves in the vinegar, not in the oil.
Yield and servingA pound of beans serves four as a side salad. Dress it no more than half an hour ahead; vinegar dulls the green quickly.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertoire written down — thousands of numbered entries, arranged so a cook could be sent to a number rather than a page. This bean salad sits in a run of cooked vegetable salads between oyster plant (salsify) and white beans, and its brevity is typical: a Delmonico's cook already knew how long to boil a haricot vert and what a vinaigrette was, so the entry records only the decisions specific to this dish. The untinned copper pan is the period detail. French professional kitchens used bare copper for green vegetables well into the twentieth century, and bare copper survives in another corner of the kitchen, in the bowls kept for whipping egg whites — though there the metal acts on the egg's proteins, not on a pigment.