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Red Beans, Bourgignonne
Soak a pint red beans in plenty of cold water during night. Drain and place in a saucepan with a quart cold water one medium onion with three cloves stuck in it and one carrot. Tie in a bunch two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a few branches chives and a bean garlic; add to the pan, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, cover the pan and let simmer for one and a half hours. Cut half the piece of pork left from yesterday into small dice pieces, add to the beans with a gill claret, lightly mix and let boil for thirty minutes longer. Take up the carrots, onion and herbs. Knead in a bowl a half ounce butter with tablespoon flour and add to the beans; mix well, cook for five minutes, dress the beans on a vegetable dish and serve.
A Burgundian bean stew built on leftovers, from a book laid out as consecutive daily menus — hence the reference to yesterday's pork. A few of its terms and quantities need translating.
- A pint of beansDried beans were measured by volume: a pint is about 2 cups, roughly 13 to 14 oz. That soaks and cooks up to serve four to six as a side dish, or four as a main.
- A gill of claretA gill is half a cup. "Claret" is the English term for red Bordeaux; any dry, unoaked red works, and it goes in with the pork so the alcohol has 30 minutes to cook off.
- "A bean garlic"Most likely a garbled rendering of a clove of garlic; the French for a clove is gousse, which also means pod or husk. Read it as one clove, tied into the herb bundle so it can be fished out with them.
- The porkThe original assumes a piece of cooked pork left from the previous day's menu; it does not say how it was cooked. Use 4 to 6 oz of leftover roast pork, or diced salt pork or pancetta rendered first in a dry pan.
- Chervil and chivesChervil is still sold fresh in some markets but fades fast; if you cannot find it, a little tarragon plus extra parsley gets closer than nothing. Tie the bundle with kitchen string rather than trusting it to hold together.
- Cooking timeAn hour and a half plus thirty minutes suited beans of unknown age. Modern packaged beans, soaked overnight, are often tender in 60 to 75 minutes — start tasting at the hour and add the pork and wine once they are nearly there, or they will collapse.
- Salt at the startThe teaspoon of salt goes in with the water, which contradicts the old warning that salt toughens beans. The original is right: salted cooking water seasons them through and does no harm.
- The beurre maniéHalf an ounce of butter (1 tablespoon) kneaded to a paste with a tablespoon of flour, then stirred into the hot liquid. Add it in small pinches while stirring and hold a bare simmer for the full five minutes, or the sauce tastes of raw flour.
The à la bourguignonne tag simply means Burgundy, and in classical French kitchen shorthand it signals red wine, onion, and often a cured pork element — the same logic that produces boeuf bourguignon. Applied to a dish of red beans it marks a frugal, regional treatment rather than a grand one: the wine is a scant half cup, and the meat is whatever was carved the day before. That leftover is the tell about the book itself, which is organized as a run of daily menus in which one day's roast quietly reappears in the next day's vegetable dish, a habit of household economy that cookbooks of the 1900s taught as a matter of course. The binding of butter and flour worked to a paste and whisked in at the end — beurre manié — is the standard French finish of the period, used here to give a loose pot of beans the gloss of a sauced dish.