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Fresh String Beans with Butter
Break the blossom, end, pull it backward to remove string, and trim off the thin strips from the other end of a quart of very fresh, tender string beans. Thoroughly wash in cold water and let stand in the water ten minutes, drain, then plunge in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon of salt, and boil forty minutes. Drain on a sieve, replace in saucepan, adding half ounce good butter, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, mix well with a fork, dress on a vegetable dish nd serve.
A plain buttered vegetable from a period when green beans were boiled into submission. Everything here holds up except the cooking time.
- The forty minutesBoil tender green beans for forty minutes and you get olive-drab pulp. Five to seven minutes in hard-boiling salted water brings them to bright green and just-tender; taste one at five minutes and go from there.
- StringingThe instruction to snap the blossom end and pull the string backward applies to older field varieties. Nearly all beans sold now are stringless, so all that is needed is topping and tailing.
- A quart of beansMeasured whole, a quart is roughly a pound, which serves three or four as a side.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of white pepper is three-quarters of a teaspoon — assertive but deliberate. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- The ten-minute soakThe recipe does not say why; most likely to crisp limp market beans and float out grit. Refrigerated beans do not need it; wilted ones benefit.
- Salting the waterA teaspoon of salt in two quarts is light by current practice. More salt in the water seasons the beans from within and there is a further half teaspoon added at the end, so hold back if you increase it.
- FinishingDrain thoroughly before returning the beans to the pan, or the butter will slide off into standing water. A dry pan over low heat for thirty seconds fixes this.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) came out of decades in New York restaurant kitchens, chiefly Delmonico's, and its vegetable chapter reflects the long-boiled European service style of that era rather than the brief blanching that later became standard. The beans themselves are Phaseolus vulgaris, a New World domesticate, and the fiddly stringing described here was a real necessity in 1906: the fibrous seam running the length of the pod had to be pulled off by hand. Breeding for stringless pods was well underway by the end of the nineteenth century — Burpee's Stringless Green Pod is generally credited as the variety that made the habit obsolete — but cookbooks went on printing the instruction for decades afterward, as this one does. The name "string bean" outlived the string.