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String Beans, Paloise (Carefully string a pint)
Carefully string a pint and a half fresh, tender string beans; cut in two, wash thoroughly, drain, then plunge in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt and two tablespoons vinegar and boil for forty minutes. Remove and thoroughly drain on a sieve, place in a bowl, season with two saltspoons salt, two saltspoons pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg; add half a teaspoon freshly chopped chervil, half a bean finely chopped garlic and one egg yolk. Mix well with a fork for three minutes, place them in a vegetable dish and serve.
A simple warm bean salad bound with raw egg yolk, in the French service style of the period. Two things in the original need attention before you cook: the boiling time and the vinegar in the water.
- Forty minutes is far too longFresh green beans are done in 4 to 8 minutes in salted boiling water, depending on thickness. Forty minutes yields olive-drab mush; the original may have had in mind larger, tougher, stringier beans than anything commonly sold today.
- Leave the vinegar out of the potAcid in the cooking water firms pectin and dulls chlorophyll, so the beans stay tough and turn grey-green. If you want the sharpness, add a splash to the bowl at the seasoning stage instead.
- StringingModern varieties are bred stringless. Snap off the stem ends and leave the tapered tips; the original instruction to string them is now redundant.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. So a half teaspoon each of salt and pepper, and a quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg for roughly 12 oz of beans, which is assertive but not wrong for the style.
- QuantitiesA pint and a half of trimmed beans is about 12 oz / 340 g, serving three or four as a side.
- Half a bean of garlicHalf a clove. Filippini uses "bean" where we would say clove, for a single segment of the head.
- ChervilHard to find fresh and it wilts within days. A mix of flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gets close to its anise-parsley character.
- The egg yolkIt is an emulsifier, not a garnish. Toss it into the beans while they are still hot from the sieve and work quickly with a fork so it coats rather than scrambles. The yolk is not cooked to a safe temperature by residual heat alone, so use a pasteurised egg if you are serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it works through the standard French repertoire of garnishes and styles that a professional kitchen was expected to produce on demand. "Paloise" means in the manner of Pau, the town in Béarn in the southwest of France; in classical cookery the name is attached most often to sauce paloise, a béarnaise made with mint in place of tarragon. Filippini's use here is looser, signalling a southwestern treatment with garlic and herbs rather than any strict formula. Binding a hot vegetable with a raw yolk gives a glossy coating with no butter or cream, and the technique survives in dishes like the yolk-thickened liaisons of blanquette and certain potato salads.