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String Beans
Open a pint can string beans, plunge them in a saucepan with boiling water two inches in depth; drain on a sieve; put them back in the saucepan with half ounce butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. Mix well with a fork while cooking for one and a half minutes. Dress on a hot vegetable dish and serve.
A brisk method for canned beans, written when canned vegetables were the default outside high summer. The whole point is the rinse-and-refresh step, which drives off the tinny brine flavour before the butter goes on.
- YieldA pint can drains to roughly a cup and a half of beans, enough for two as a side. Scale the butter and salt accordingly if you double it.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. The recipe has it mixed in over heat with a fork; adding it cold rather than pre-melted helps it coat the beans.
- A saltspoonAbout a quarter teaspoon. Salt cellars came with a small spoon for exactly this measure; it is not a precise unit, so taste rather than count.
- The boiling water stepTwo inches of boiling water, enough to cover the beans in most pans, is there to rinse them. Thirty seconds to a minute is plenty for canned beans, which are already fully cooked; longer and they slump.
- Ninety seconds and no moreThe stated timing is the hinge of the recipe. Canned beans have no texture in reserve, so the butter stage is purely to coat and heat through, not to cook.
- Salt the beans, not the waterCommercially canned beans are usually packed in brine. Drain, rinse, then season at the end, or the dish comes out too salty.
- If using fresh or frozenFresh beans need 4-6 minutes in well-salted boiling water and frozen about 3, then drain thoroughly before the butter. The finishing step is unchanged.
- White pepperUsually chosen so no dark flecks show on a pale green vegetable. Black pepper tastes noticeably different but will do as a substitute.
Canned string beans were, by the time this book was compiled, a year-round staple in urban kitchens where fresh beans meant a short summer season. The instruction to blanch a canned vegetable in fresh boiling water before dressing it was presumably meant to wash away the flavor left by the brine and the metal lining. The name "string bean" refers to the fibrous string along the pod seam, which growers largely bred out over the twentieth century; the beans sold today as green beans are the same plant, simply stringless. That a recipe this slight was thought worth printing at all says something about the period's assumption that a vegetable served plain still needed a method.