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String Bean Salad with Eggs
Open a pint can string beans, wash well in cold water, then thoroughly drain on a cloth. Place in a bowl, add two hard-boiled eggs, cut into eight pieces each, and half teaspoon freshly chopped tarragon. Season with three and a half liberal tablespoons of dressing. mix well and serve.
A straightforward composed salad that depends almost entirely on the beans being dry and the dressing being sharp. Two points in the original need translating: the can size and the unnamed "dressing."
- The pint canA pint can of string beans is roughly the size of a standard modern 14-16 oz can, which drains to somewhere around 8 oz of beans. One such can, or about 3/4 lb of fresh beans blanched until just tender and shocked in ice water, gives about the same volume. Enough for two as a side, three at a stretch.
- Wash and dry themThis is the hinge. Canned beans carry a tinny, salty packing liquid that will dilute the dressing and flatten the tarragon. Rinse, then spread on a towel and blot until the surfaces are genuinely dry, or the vinaigrette slides off.
- What "dressing" means hereThe recipe leaves it unnamed, which most likely points to a plain French dressing: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked to hold together. Three and a half tablespoons is enough to coat, not pool.
- TarragonHalf a teaspoon of fresh chopped tarragon is workable as written, alongside the salt and pepper in the dressing. Dried tarragon is thinner and slightly hay-like; use well under a quarter teaspoon and let the salad stand ten minutes so it softens.
- Cutting the eggsEight pieces each is most easily read as lengthwise quarters halved crosswise rather than slices. The chunks hold their shape when tossed; slices break up and smear yolk through the dressing.
- Mix well, gentlyFold rather than toss vigorously. Dress the beans first, then add the egg and turn it through two or three times so the whites stay intact.
- TemperatureServe cool but not fridge-cold. Straight from refrigeration the oil goes dull and the tarragon reads as nothing; ten minutes on the counter fixes it.
String bean salads like this one belong to the moment when canned vegetables became a respectable convenience rather than an admission of poverty. By the 1910s American and European kitchens both had reliable canned beans year-round, and recipes of the period were willing to open a tin — while still, as here, instructing the cook to wash the packing liquid away. The tarragon and the oil-and-vinegar dressing point to a French treatment: beans, egg and tarragon vinaigrette is essentially the logic of a small salade composée, the kind of dish served as a first course or alongside cold meat. The name "string bean" is itself a period artifact, referring to the fibrous string along the pod that breeders had bred out of commercial varieties from the late 1890s onward, which is why the same vegetable is now sold as a green bean.