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String Bean Noisettes
Open a pint can string beans, remove all the water, drop them in a pint boiling water with a half teaspoon salt, boil for five minutes and thoroughly drain on a sieve. Place an ounce butter in a black frying pan and shuffle pan on fire until it attains a nice brown colour. Add the beans with a half teaspoon vinegar, three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons pepper, toss well while heating for one minute, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A canned-bean side dish that lives or dies on the butter. The name has nothing to do with nuts in the pan: noisette here means the butter is browned to a hazelnut colour, which is the whole point of the recipe.
- Brown the butter properlyMelt the ounce (2 tablespoons) over medium heat and keep the pan moving until the milk solids turn nut-brown and the smell turns toasty, roughly two to three minutes. Stop short and you have plain melted butter; go thirty seconds long and it is acrid.
- Saltspoon measuresA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of salt is 3/4 teaspoon and two saltspoons of pepper is a full 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive by current taste and worth halving on a first attempt, especially as canned beans arrive salted.
- The canA pint can is roughly the size of today's standard 14.5 to 15 oz can, with a drained weight of about 8 oz depending on the brand. Rinsing rather than merely draining removes more of the tinny brine.
- The five-minute boilCanned beans are already fully cooked; this step is there to freshen them and wash out can flavour. One or two minutes in the salted water is enough, and with fresh or frozen beans you would blanch to tenderness instead, then shock and dry them.
- Dry the beansDrain hard on a sieve and let them steam off, or shake them in the dry pot for a moment. Wet beans dropped into brown butter will spit and dilute the sauce.
- "A black frying pan"Cast iron or blued carbon steel. A light stainless or enamelled pan does the same job and makes the butter's colour easier to read.
- VinegarHalf a teaspoon, added with the beans as the recipe directs, sharpens the browned butter; a plain cider or white wine vinegar suits, and lemon juice is a reasonable substitute.
- YieldOne can serves two to three as a side. Serve at once: the butter sets and dulls as the dish cools.
Noisette butter, better known now as beurre noisette, is a long-established and cheap trick of French cookery: butter cooked until its milk solids toast and the fat smells of hazelnuts, then used as a sauce in its own right. Its appearance here, poured over canned beans, shows what The International Cook Book was for. Alexander Filippini spent much of his career in the dining rooms of Delmonico's in New York, and books like this carried restaurant technique into American home kitchens that were increasingly stocked from cans rather than gardens. Commercially canned vegetables were ordinary household goods by the 1900s. A splash of vinegar is a familiar corrective in browned-butter preparations, cutting the richness.