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String Beans, Etuves
Carefully string a quart fresh, tender string beans, cut in two, place in a saucepan, and pour in white broth enough to cover them. Finely chop a branch parsley, half bean sound garlic, and add to beans. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, mix well, cover saucepan with a towel, place lid on, and let cook for forty-five minutes. Uncover, add an ounce butter, carefully mix with a fork, dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A French étuvée in miniature: beans stewed slowly in a little stock under a sealed lid until they collapse into tenderness. Two things in the original need translating before you start — the towel and the cooking time.
- The towel under the lidThis is the hinge of the recipe. A cloth laid over the pan and pressed down by the lid seals the rim and returns condensation to the pan, so the small amount of broth does not boil away in forty-five minutes. A tight modern lid, or a round of parchment cut to fit inside the pan, does the same job with no risk of cloth touching a gas flame.
- White brothA light, unbrowned stock — veal or chicken simmered without roasting the bones. Any pale, low-salt chicken stock works; avoid dark beef stock or anything heavily reduced, which will overwhelm the beans and turn the dish muddy.
- "Half bean sound garlic"Almost certainly "half a bean of sound garlic" — a bean-sized fragment, meaning roughly half a small clove, not half a head. "Sound" here appears to mean unblemished. The quantity is deliberately tiny; the garlic is a background note.
- A quart of beansAbout 1 lb / 450 g trimmed, which serves four as a side. "Cut in two" means snapped across the middle, not sliced lengthwise.
- Forty-five minutesThe original calls the beans "fresh, tender" yet still gives them forty-five minutes, a timing that suits the stringier beans of the period more than today's. Modern stringless varieties will likely be soft in 15 to 20 minutes and may go to mush at forty-five. Check at fifteen and cook until they yield completely — this is not a crisp-tender dish, but it should not be a purée either.
- Broth level"Enough to cover" plus a sealed lid leaves you with liquid at the end. If you want the buttery glaze the recipe implies, use about half a cup and let it reduce to a few spoonfuls in the last minutes before the butter goes in.
- The butterAn ounce is 2 tablespoons. Turning it through with a fork rather than stirring with a spoon may be intended to keep the beans whole; taking the pan off the heat will help the butter emulsify with the remaining broth rather than pool.
Alexander Filippini spent some thirty years in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects that: French method, Italian instincts, and an American audience being taught both. Étuvé — from the French étuver — describes cooking with very little liquid under a seal so the vegetable steams in its own moisture and whatever broth is added, a technique long used for vegetables in French kitchens. The towel wedged under the lid works on the same principle as a luted seal, the flour-and-water paste once used to close a pot airtight. That Filippini specifies stringing the beans at all is a reminder of how much the vegetable has changed: stringless varieties were spreading only in the decade or so before this book was printed, and the fibrous seam along the pod was still a fact of life for many cooks of the period.