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French Flageolets, Cubannaise
Open a pint can French flageolets, plunge in a pint boiling water, boil for five minutes and drain on a sieve. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add one each chopped onion and seeded green pepper and gently brown for five minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Peel, cut in halves, remove seeds, then cut in small pieces two large red tomatoes and add to pan with flageolets. Season with half teaspoon each salt and sugar, two saltspoons pepper, mix well and gently cook for fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Mix on a saucer a teaspoon butter with teaspoon flour and add to flageolets, mix until well thickened, dress flageolets in a vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward canned-bean side dish built on a pepper-and-tomato base, with a butter-and-flour thickening at the end. Nothing here is difficult; the archaic parts are the measures and the bean itself.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green immature kidney beans, still sold canned and dried in French and specialty groceries. A 15-16 oz can stands in for the "pint can"; from dried, about 3/4 cup soaked and simmered until tender gives the same volume.
- The five-minute boilThis is a refresh, not a cooking step - it rinses off canning liquid and warms the beans. Two minutes is enough with modern canned beans, and a hard boil will start breaking them up. Drain well or the finished dish waters down.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is therefore half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for the quantity of beans.
- Melted butterOne and a half tablespoons. The wording leaves it unclear whether the measure is taken melted or solid; the difference is immaterial here.
- Peeling the tomatoesThe recipe assumes it: score, dip in boiling water for fifteen seconds, and slip the skins. Two large tomatoes is roughly a pound; out of season, a drained 14 oz can of chopped tomatoes works better than pale fresh ones.
- The kneaded butterButter mashed with flour on a saucer is beurre mani\00equal amounts by the recipe's own measure, a teaspoon of each. Add it in small pieces off a hard boil and stir until the sauce coats; if it goes in as a lump into a rapid boil you get flour streaks.
- Heat and timingThe fifteen-minute cook is at a bare simmer - enough to soften the pepper and collapse the tomato without turning the beans to paste. Keep the pan uncovered so the tomato liquid reduces.
- YieldNo yield is given; a pint can of beans with the vegetables makes about four vegetable-side portions. It reheats well.
Flageolets are the classic French bean for serving alongside lamb, harvested young so they stay green and hold their shape, and canned imports of this kind were available to American cooks by the early 1900s - which may be why this recipe opens with a can rather than a soaking bowl. The name "Cubannaise" is not a term one finds documented elsewhere, though it seems to point to a treatment in the Caribbean or Spanish manner: onion, green pepper and tomato sweated together, the same trio that underlies a Cuban sofrito. Cookbooks of this era, and international collections in particular, used such national tags loosely, attaching them to any dish with the right suggestive ingredients rather than to a documented regional original. The result is a French bean dressed in a Spanish-Caribbean sauce and thickened with a thoroughly French beurre manié - a fair picture of how a "world" repertoire was assembled at the time.