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Flageolets, Saute Au Tarragon
Open a pint can extra fine French flageolets, remove all the water, then plunge in boiling water for six minutes. Drain and place in saucepan with a half ounce good butter, a teaspoon freshly chopped tarragon leaves, a half teaspoon each salt and sugar and a half saltspoon pepper. Toss well while heating for a minute, dress on vegetable dish and serve.
A five-minute side dish that depends entirely on the quality of the beans and the freshness of the tarragon. Nothing here needs updating except the units and the shopping.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green immature kidney beans, still a French staple and sold dried, jarred or canned in most well-stocked shops. "Extra fine" is a French size grade rather than a packaging format; a 14-15 oz can or jar stands in for the pint.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Half a saltspoon is an eighth of a teaspoon of pepper, which is about right for a pint of beans.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon. Weigh it if you like precision; the beans are the point and the butter should coat rather than pool.
- The six-minute plungeThis is reheating, not cooking. Canned flageolets are already tender, and left in rolling water much longer they split and turn mealy. Drain the canning liquid, warm them through, drain again.
- TarragonFrench tarragon, chopped just before use. Dried tarragon is a different and duller thing here; if it is all you have, use a scant half teaspoon and add it to the melting butter so it has a moment to soften.
- The sugarHalf a teaspoon is seasoning, not sweetening. It rounds out the slight chalkiness of canned beans in the same way a pinch of sugar is used in tomato sauce.
- Toss, do not stirA minute of shaking the pan keeps the beans whole. A spoon worked through them breaks skins and muddies the dish.
- YieldA pint of beans serves four as a side, three if it is standing in for a starch alongside lamb.
Flageolets are the classic French accompaniment to roast leg of lamb, and the pairing is still fixed in French home cooking, though it is generally dated no earlier than the end of the nineteenth century. The bean is generally traced to the Paris region, where it was selected as a variety picked young, before the seed hardens and yellows, which is what gives it the pale green colour. That this recipe opens a can rather than soaking dried beans says something about the book's moment: imported French tinned vegetables were a mark of a well-provisioned early-twentieth-century American kitchen. The tarragon fixes the dish firmly as French in intent, signalling to the reader that this is meant to taste like something served abroad.