No. 706

Puree of Beans Bretonne

Puree de Haricots Bretonne

Mince half a pound of onions; set them in a saucepan with four ounces of butter, a bunch of parsley garnished with bay leaf, garlic, thyme and salt; let fry slowly, browning the onions slightly. Let one pound of white beans soak for twelve hours, then boil them with two ounces of butter added, and when nearly done, drain and pound them in a mortar with the onions, suppressing the parsley; add a pint of bechamel (No. 409), two gills of double cream, and two tablespoonfuls of chicken glaze (No. 398); press through a tammy (No. 170) and add two ounces of butter at the very last moment.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A Delmonico's-era vegetable purée meant as a garnish under or beside roast meat, not as a soup. Two things carry it: the beans must be soft enough to break down completely, and the finishing butter must go in off the heat.

The hinge: the final butterThe last two ounces go in "at the very last moment," which in practice means off the fire; letting the puree boil after that risks breaking the emulsion, leaving it greasy rather than glossy.
Gills and pintsTwo gills is one cup. "Double cream" here means the richest cream available; heavy cream at 36 percent or more is the closest supermarket equivalent. The pint of béchamel is a US pint, two cups.
White beansHaricots blancs — cannellini, flageolet or navy beans. One pound dry is about 2.5 cups and yields roughly 6 cups cooked. Eight hours of soaking is generally enough, though the full 12 the recipe calls for does no harm.
Chicken glazeNo. 398 is glace de volaille, chicken stock reduced until it sets to a syrup. Substitute two tablespoons of heavily reduced unsalted chicken stock, or a commercial glace; bouillon cubes will make it salty and flat.
Mortar and tammyThe tammy (No. 170) is a fine worsted cloth the purée was forced through with a wooden spatula. A food mill on the fine plate, or a blender followed by a drum sieve or fine chinois, gives the same texture with far less labour. Do not overwork beans in a food processor — they go gluey.
The aromaticsThe parsley bunch with bay, thyme and garlic is a bouquet garni and is removed ("suppressing the parsley") before pounding. Tie it with string so it comes out whole.
Browning the onionsHalf a pound of onions in four ounces of butter over low heat, taken only as far as the recipe asks: "browning the onions slightly."
Seasoning and yieldSalt is added only to the onion base; taste again after the glaze and cream go in. As written this makes somewhere between a quart and a half and two quarts of puree.

A Little History

À la bretonne is one of the older regional tags in French cookery, and it almost always signals white beans: Brittany and the neighbouring Vendée were long associated with the haricot, and the classic garnish for a leg of mutton is still haricots à la bretonne, beans in an onion-and-tomato base. Charles Ranhofer, who ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades and published The Epicurean in 1894, files this among his garnishings rather than his vegetables — in a restaurant of that scale a purée was a component, spooned onto the plate beneath a saddle of lamb or a roast bird, and the cross-references to a numbered béchamel and a numbered chicken glaze show a kitchen where the foundations were made in bulk each morning. The enrichment here is enormous by any standard: eight ounces of butter, a cup of cream and a pint of béchamel to a single pound of beans, which tells you plainly what a peasant legume became once it passed through a Gilded Age brigade.