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String Beans in Mold
(Sformato di fagiolini) Take one pound of string beans, seeing that they are quite tender. Cut off the ends and remove the strings. Throw them into boiling water with a pinch of salt and when they are half cooked take them away and put them in cold water. If you have brown stock complete the cooking with this and with butter, otherwise brown a piece of onion, some parsley, a piece of celery and olive oil. When the onion is browned put in the string beans and complete the cooking with a little water if necessary.
Prepare a Balsamella sauce (No. 54) with a small piece of butter, half a teaspoonful of flour and half a cup of milk. With this, a tablespoonful of grated cheese and four beaten eggs bind the string beans when they are cold, mix and put in a mold, evenly greased with butter and the bottom covered with paper. Cook in a double boiler and serve hot. 95
A sformato is a savory vegetable custard steamed in a mold — closer to a timbale than to a gratin. The whole dish stands or falls on the temperature of the beans when the eggs go in.
- Cool the beans firstThe instruction to bind them "when they are cold" is the hinge. Four beaten eggs stirred into hot beans will scramble in streaks and the sformato will weep instead of setting smoothly.
- Balsamella proportionsHalf a teaspoonful of flour to half a cup of milk gives very little body. If you want a sauce firm enough to bind the beans, increase the flour and butter and whisk to a thick, pourable sauce; the book's own No. 54 gives its proportions.
- Brown stockThis means a dark meat stock, reduced and gelatinous, not bouillon-cube broth. If you do not have it, take the second option in the recipe — the onion, parsley, celery and oil — which is a plain soffritto.
- "Half cooked"Blanch the trimmed beans 3-4 minutes in well-salted boiling water, then shock in cold water to set the color. They finish in the stock or soffritto, and should be fully tender before they meet the eggs.
- The mold and the paperAny straight-sided metal charlotte mold, pudding basin or 1-quart souffle dish will do. "Covered with paper" means a butter-greased round of parchment on the bottom, which is what lets the sformato turn out cleanly.
- Cooking in a double boilerThis is a bain-marie, not a steamer basket: set the covered mold in a pan of water reaching two-thirds up its sides and hold the water at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil. Timing will depend on the mold, but expect somewhere around three-quarters of an hour; it is done when the center is just firm and a knife comes out clean. A moderate oven with the same water bath is a workable modern alternative.
- The cheeseGrated cheese here is Parmesan, dry and finely grated — a tablespoon is for seasoning, not for structure.
- Yield and servingA pound of beans and four eggs makes four modest portions as a first course or vegetable side. Rest the mold 5 minutes before inverting onto a warm plate, peel off the paper, and serve at once; it collapses as it cools.
This is one of the many sformati in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), which Maria Gentile abridged and translated for American readers as The Italian Cook Book in 1919. The word comes from sformare, to turn out of a form, and the whole family of dishes belongs to the nineteenth-century Italian borghese table, where French technique — the balsamella is simply béchamel under an Italian name — was applied to vegetables that would otherwise have been served plainly dressed. Steaming a custard in a covered mold set in water was a common way to cook one before reliable oven thermostats existed, and it survives in Italian home cooking still. The number 95 at the end is most likely a page number.