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Lima Beans, Fourangelle
Mix in saucepan an ounce butter with one and a half ounces flour and heat for half minute, stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a pint broth, mix until it comes to a boil, then season with a light teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg, add a pint of shelled, fresh lima beans and half teaspoon chopped parsley, gently mix, cover the pan and let slowly boil for thirty minutes, being careful to lightly mix once in a while. Dilute one egg yolk in a half gill cream and the juice of quarter of a sound lemon and add to the beans, mix while heating for one minute, dress on a hot vegetable dish and serve.
Wednesday, Second Week of September
A classic white-sauce vegetable dish finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. Everything hinges on the last minute of cooking.
- Do not boil the finishOnce the yolk, cream and lemon go in, the sauce must be held below a simmer — one minute of gentle heat is all it takes. A boil curdles the yolk and the lemon juice makes curdling likelier still.
- Weights and old measuresAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 1½ ounces flour is about a third of a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne and nutmeg are each 1/4 teaspoon. Half a gill is 1/4 cup.
- That is a thick roux1½ ounces flour to a pint of broth gives a heavy sauce that will thicken further as the beans give off starch. Have extra broth at hand to loosen it, or start with a scant pint of flour-to-liquid ratio nearer 1 ounce.
- Cooking timeThirty minutes suits large, mature shell beans. Modern fresh or frozen limas are tender in 15 to 20 minutes; taste at 15 and stop when they are creamy but not collapsing.
- Frozen beansA pint of shelled fresh limas is roughly 10 ounces, which one standard bag of frozen baby limas covers. Add them still frozen and count time from when the sauce returns to a simmer.
- BrothVeal or light chicken stock would suit; the recipe says only "broth". Unsalted stock is safer here, since the recipe already calls for a light teaspoon of salt.
- Temper the liaisonWhisk a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce into the yolk and cream before adding it back to the pan, then keep stirring off the direct heat.
- YieldServes four as a side dish. It does not reheat gracefully — the egg breaks — so make it to be eaten.
The name is likely a compositor's slip for à la Tourangelle, the style of Touraine, the Loire province around Tours; nineteenth-century French kitchen vocabulary generally attached the term to a garnish of vegetables bound in a cream sauce. A liaison of yolk, cream and a squeeze of lemon stirred in off the boil is the same device used for blanquette de veau and for classic sauce allemande, and the appearance of such a finish on a plain dish of shell beans is exactly what French technique applied to whatever the market had looks like. Lima beans themselves are a New World crop, named for the Peruvian capital, and by the time this book was printed they were common enough in the eastern United States to need dressing up rather than introducing.