Home › The World's Kitchen › Flageolets, Creole
Flageolets, Creole
Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add one finely minced green pepper and one finely minced onion, lightly brown for five minutes, tossing a little meanwhile, then add one pint well-drained canned flageolets. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, half teaspoon sugar and cook for five minutes, tossing them well meanwhile. Then add two peeled and crushed red tomatoes and one tablespoon butter. Mix well and cook for ten minutes more, occasionally mixing, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A simple stovetop side that depends entirely on not overcooking the beans, which arrive already tender from the can. Two conversions are all the recipe really needs.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon. That is a generous amount of black pepper for two cups of beans; taste as you go.
- A pint of drained flageoletsMeasured by volume after draining, this is about two cups, which means about a can and a half of the usual 15-ounce cans. If you cook them from dried, something under a cup of dried flageolets simmered until tender gives about the same volume.
- FlageoletsPale green immature kidney beans, still sold canned or dried under the French name and sometimes labelled chevrier. Cannellini or small navy beans substitute in texture but not in the grassy flavour that makes the dish.
- The hingeCanned beans are fully cooked. All the folding and tossing here is meant to be gentle and brief; stir with a rubber spatula rather than a spoon, or you will finish with fifteen minutes of bean puree.
- The tomatoes"Two peeled and crushed red tomatoes" assumes ripe summer fruit with real acidity. Out of season use about a cup of drained canned tomatoes, crushed, and let some of the liquid cook away in the final ten minutes.
- Heat levelKeep the pan at medium throughout. The pepper and onion are meant to be "lightly brown" after five minutes, which is softened and just colouring, not caramelised.
- YieldServes about four as a side dish. It is better warm than hot.
Flageolets are immature kidney beans picked and dried while still pale green, and their rise as a distinct market vegetable is generally traced to French seed growers around Arpajon, south of Paris, in the second half of the nineteenth century — the name chevrier that still appears on packets is traditionally credited to a grower of that name. By the time this book was compiled they were widely used in the French kitchen, often said to be the classic accompaniment to roast leg of lamb, and canned flageolets were available to American cooks who would never have seen the fresh pods. "Creole" here signals the treatment rather than the bean: green pepper, onion and tomato cooked down in butter, the pattern that ran through Louisiana cooking and, in the international cookbooks of the period, became a shorthand applied to almost anything from eggs to shrimp to a can of beans.