No. 2658

White Bean Salad

Salade de Haricots Blancs

When the white beans are cooked the same as for No. 2701, and cold, put them in a salad bowl with a little shallot, chives and parsley, all finely chopped, and for each quart of beans add two tablespoonfuls of vinegar and six of oil, salt and pepper; stir well and serve.

RAW VEGETABLE SALADS (Salades de Legumes Crus).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A plain haricot salad from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, resting entirely on the quality of the beans and the proportion of the dressing. The one thing the original assumes and does not say is that beans take dressing best while still warm.

The cross-referenceNo. 2701 is the book's own white-bean cooking recipe, which the text supplied here does not reproduce. Any well-cooked white bean works — cannellini, Great Northern, navy — cooked in salted water until creamy but not collapsing.
Dress warm, serve coldThe recipe says the beans are cold, but the oil and vinegar are absorbed far better while the beans are still hot from the pot. Dress them warm, then let them come to room temperature or chill, and check the seasoning again before serving, since cold blunts both salt and acid.
QuantitiesA quart of cooked beans is roughly 1½ cups of dried beans before soaking. The dressing works out to 2 tablespoons vinegar and 6 tablespoons oil — a 1:3 ratio.
Shallot and chives"A little shallot" for a quart of beans means one small shallot, minced fine; raw shallot dominates quickly. Chop the chives and parsley just before use.
OilThe recipe specifies only oil and vinegar. A robust extra-virgin will taste heavy at six tablespoons to a quart; a milder oil suits the dish better, and a wine vinegar is the likelier reading than cider or malt.
Stirring"Stir well" needs a light hand — a folding motion with a spatula. Vigorous stirring breaks the skins and turns the salad pasty, which is the usual failure with cooked-bean salads.
YieldA quart of beans dressed this way serves six to eight as a side. It keeps two or three days refrigerated and improves on the first day.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a near-complete record of a grand restaurant kitchen, and its vegetable-salad chapter runs through bean after bean. The salad itself reads as French bourgeois cooking rather than restaurant invention: haricots blancs en salade was a familiar use for a pot of beans already cooked for a garnish or a soup, and the shallot-chive-parsley trio is a common French approach to a cold vegetable. That Ranhofer sends the reader to No. 2701 for the cooking is characteristic of the book — it is organized as a professional reference, assuming a cook who can already boil a bean and only needs the proportions for the dressing.