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Butter Beans
Break the blossom end, pull it backward, removing the string, and trim off the thin strip from the other end of a quart of very fresh butter beans. Thoroughly wash in cold water, drain well, and place in a saucepan with enough boiling water to cover them; add a teaspoon salt, cover the pan, and cook for forty minutes. Drain all the water from the pan, then add one ounce butter, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Mix well with a fork. Dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
This is a pod bean, not a dried lima — the stringing and trimming make that clear, which tells you it was written before stringless varieties became standard. Almost everything here works as given except the cooking time.
- Forty minutes is far too longModern pod beans, whether green, flat romano or yellow wax, are done in 5 to 8 minutes in boiling water. Forty minutes gives you olive-drab mush. Cook until the pods bend without snapping and still have some resistance at the centre.
- What "butter beans" means hereIn this context it is the young edible pod of a snap bean rather than a shelled or dried lima. If you buy dried or frozen lima beans expecting to string them, you have the wrong ingredient.
- Stringing is mostly obsoleteStringing is often unnecessary now -- Stringless commercial varieties have been available since around the turn of the twentieth century and are now the norm. Snap the blossom end off one pod and pull; if no string comes away, skip the step and just top and tail them.
- A quart of beansMeasured as whole pods, roughly 1 to 1.25 lb, which serves three or four as a side.
- One ounce butterTwo tablespoons. Add it to the hot drained beans off the heat so it emulsifies with the residual moisture rather than splitting.
- Salt the water properlyA teaspoon in a pan of water is light by current practice; season the cooking water more assertively and the beans will need less finishing salt than the extra half teaspoon called for.
- Draining and dryingAfter draining, return the pan to low heat for a few seconds to drive off surface water before the butter goes in. Otherwise the seasoning slides off into a puddle on the dish.
The instruction to break the blossom end and pull the string backward is the signature of an era when most green beans had a tough fibre running the length of the pod; "string beans" was a common name for them, chiefly in American usage, and stringless cultivars were still working their way into seed catalogues and market gardens. Names for beans have always shifted regionally, and butter bean means a dried or fresh lima in both British and American usage, but it has long been applied to pale-podded snap varieties as well, and this recipe plainly belongs to the second sense. The long boil is typical of the period rather than a fault of this particular book: vegetables were widely cooked until fully soft, and the brief, bright cooking of green vegetables became standard advice only later in the twentieth century. What survives intact is the finish, butter, salt, pepper and chopped parsley stirred through with a fork, which remains the plain and best treatment for a good pod bean.