Home › The World's Kitchen › String Beans, Poulette
String Beans, Poulette
Open and drain well a pint can string beans. Plunge in boiling water for two minutes; remove, drain and place in a frying pan. Heat a tablespoon butter in a very small saucepan, add a tablespoon flour, mix well, then pour in half gill cold milk and half gill cream. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon ground nutmeg; thoroughly mix and let boil on the fire for one minute. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon milk and gradually add to the sauce, continually mixing while doing so. Then strain the sauce into the beans. Squeeze in the juice of quarter of a lemon, sprinkle over half teaspoon fresh chopped parsley. Mix well and slowly heat, without boiling, for two minutes. Transfer the beans into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A classic velouté-style liaison poured over canned beans — quick, but the egg yolk gives you about a minute of margin before it scrambles.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolkThe hinge: do not boil after the yolk -- Once the diluted yolk goes in, keep the sauce below a simmer, around 170-180F. The flour in the sauce gives some protection, but a hard boil can still curdle the liaison; the recipe's strainer will catch small specks, not a broken sauce.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. The sauce is 1/4 cup milk plus 1/4 cup cream against a tablespoon each of butter and flour — a thick binding sauce, not a pourable one.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That makes 1/4 teaspoon cayenne, which is assertive by current taste; a generous pinch is a safer starting point. The nutmeg works out to 1/8 teaspoon.
- Canned beans are already cookedThe two minutes in boiling water is to rinse off the can liquid and warm the beans through, nothing more. Drain them well or the sauce will thin out in the pan.
- Fresh or frozen insteadAbout 12 oz of trimmed fresh green beans, boiled 4–6 minutes to just tender and drained, stands in for the pint can. Frozen whole beans need only be cooked to hot.
- Straining the saucePushing the sauce through a fine sieve onto the beans catches any flour lumps or set egg. Worth doing even if the sauce looks smooth.
- Lemon lastAcid added to a hot dairy sauce can break it, so keep the heat low when the lemon juice goes in and serve promptly rather than holding the dish.
- YieldServes two as a side, three at a stretch. Best served straight away; reheating risks tightening or separating the yolk-finished sauce.
Poulette is one of the old French mother-sauce derivatives: a white sauce finished with egg yolk, lemon and parsley, and long associated with mussels (moules à la poulette), tripe, veal and mushrooms. The name comes from poule, a hen, and is generally traced to the yolk that enriches it rather than to any chicken in the dish. What dates this version is the pint can of string beans opened without apology: a book called The International Cook Book could pair factory beans with a classically constructed liaison in a single paragraph. The result is a small, telling picture of the period — French technique applied to industrial groceries.