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String Beans, Orleannaise
Carefully break both ends and pull off strings from a quart of fresh, tender string beans, cut in two, then plunge in two quarts boiling water with teaspoon salt and half gill good vinegar and boil forty minutes. Thoroughly drain. Heat an ounce butter in a black frying pan, add one exceedingly fine-chopped sound white onion and gently fry five minutes, tossing once in a while. Add the beans. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and half teaspoon chopped chervil, toss well, and briskly brown five minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile. Then squeeze in juice of half a sound orange, toss well for a minute and serve.
A simple sauté that reads oddly to modern eyes because of the long initial boil and the vinegar in the cooking water. Both are worth understanding before you decide how faithful to be.
- The forty-minute boilBeans of this period were often picked more mature than today's, and cooks expected them fully soft. Tender modern haricots verts are done in 4-6 minutes, ordinary green beans in 6-8; boiled for forty they collapse into mush and cannot be browned afterwards.
- Vinegar in the waterHalf a gill is 1/4 cup. Acid in the cooking water sets the pectin, so the beans hold their shape through the long boil, but it also strips them of green colour and leaves them drab. If you shorten the boil, leave the vinegar out; the orange juice at the end supplies the acidity.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them are half a teaspoon of white pepper — assertive but not absurd for a dish with no other sauce.
- A quart of beansMeasured whole and untrimmed, that is roughly a pound, which after trimming feeds four as a side dish.
- The black frying panCast iron, seasoned and dark. It matters here only because the recipe wants the beans genuinely browned rather than steamed, and iron holds heat well enough to do it. The beans must be very well drained and dry or they will never take colour.
- ChervilSold fresh in few supermarkets and nearly useless dried. Its flavour sits between parsley and tarragon; a mix of chopped parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the usual substitute.
- The orangeThe juice goes in at the very end and is tossed for a minute only, long enough to coat the beans; the recipe gives no direction to take the pan off the fire. Half an orange yields roughly two tablespoons; much more and the dish turns sweet.
Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906) works through hundreds of short vegetable treatments like this one, each tagged with a place-name that signals a defining ingredient rather than a documented regional tradition. What the label "Orleannaise" is meant to signal here is not clear: classical French usage attaches "à l'orléanaise" to garnishes unconnected with vinegar, though vinegar is the unusual element in the cooking water in this recipe. The orange finish is the other half of the idea: citrus and vinegar together. Filippini spent his career in New York restaurant kitchens, and his book reads as a working chef's index of variations, the sort of list a cook consults to avoid serving string beans the same way twice in a week.