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String Beans with Corn
Break the blossom ends, pull backward and remove the strings of a pint fresh, tender string beans, neatly pare the thin strips from other end of beans, cut in two, plunge them into a quart water with a teaspoon salt and gently boil for forty minutes. Drain.
Cut away the stalks, remove the leaves and silk from three good-sized tender ears of green corn; drop them in a saucepan with two quarts boiling water, a quarter pint milk, teaspoon salt, and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain and let slightly cool off, then with the back of a knife blade detach grains from the cobs. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add the beans and corn, season with three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons pepper, cook for eight minutes, tossing well meanwhile, dress on a vegetable dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A plain succotash under another name. The proportions are sound; the boiling times belong to an era of tougher, starchier vegetables and are the one thing to change.
- The timings are the hingeForty minutes will reduce modern string beans to olive-drab mush, and twenty-five minutes turns sweet corn floury. Young beans need 4-6 minutes in salted boiling water, corn on the cob 3-5 minutes; both should still have bite before they meet the butter.
- Stringing the beansThe instruction to snap the blossom end and pull the string backward assumes a variety with a fibrous seam. Nearly all beans sold now are stringless, so simply top and tail them and cut in two.
- A pint of beansA dry measure by volume, not weight: about 8 oz, or half a pound of trimmed beans.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, two saltspoons pepper is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive; add the pepper to taste.
- The milk in the corn waterA quarter pint (half a cup) of milk in the cooking water is a traditional trick, said to keep the kernels pale and tender; a pinch of sugar is the more common addition now.
- Cutting the kernelsScraping with the back of the blade, as directed, presses out the milky pulp along with the grains and gives a creamier finish than slicing them off cleanly. Stand the cob in a wide bowl to catch it.
- Green corn"Green corn" means fresh sweet corn at the milk stage, not a green-coloured variety. Three good ears yield roughly two cups of kernels.
- Butter and yieldOne tablespoon is thin for four cups of vegetables; two is better, and the eight minutes of tossing is mainly to marry the flavours and evaporate surface water. Serves four as a side dish.
String beans and corn cooked together is succotash, from the Narragansett msickquatash, usually read as a word for boiled whole kernels; the dish came to English-speaking cooks in New England from Algonquian practice, where beans and maize were grown and eaten together long before the colonial period. The pairing is usually made with shell beans -- lima or cranberry -- and this version's use of green string beans is the summer-garden variation, cooked when the pods are still young rather than left to fill out.