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String Beans with Egg Sauce
(Fagiuolini in salsa d'uovo) Take less than a pound of string beans, cutting off the two points and removing all the strings, and then cook them partially in water moderately salted. Take them from the kettle, drain, and brown with butter, salt and pepper. Beat one yolk with a teaspoonful of flour and the juice of half a small lemon, dilute with half a cup of cold broth from which the fat has been removed and put this liquid on the fire in a small saucepan stirring continually. When the liquid has become, through the cooking, like a cream, pour it on the string beans that you will keep on the fire a little longer, with the sauce. The string beans so prepared can be served with boiled beef. 94
A short, sound recipe: blanched beans finished in butter, then bound with a lemon-egg liaison. The only real difficulty is keeping the sauce from scrambling.
- The hingeKeep the yolk sauce well below a rolling boil. Cook it over low heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens to the consistency of thin cream; the teaspoon of flour gives some protection, but hard boiling still risks curdling the yolk.
- Quantities"Less than a pound" of beans means roughly 12-14 oz, serving three or four as a side. Half a cup of broth is 4 fl oz.
- Blanching"Cook them partially" means a few minutes in the moderately salted water the recipe calls for, until the beans bend without snapping. They will finish in the butter and again in the sauce, so stop while they are still firm.
- BrothThe recipe asks only for cold broth with the fat removed; given the dish is served with boiled beef, the pot liquor is the obvious source. Unsalted or low-sodium beef stock works; if you use a salty commercial stock, hold back on salt when browning the beans.
- BrowningThe recipe gives no quantity or timing for the butter; a hot saut ight, a few minutes, will colour the beans. Drain them well first or they will steam instead.
- InsuranceWhisk the flour into the lemon juice and yolk before adding the broth, and add the broth cold as written. Slow, even heating and the starch together give the yolk a wide margin.
- ServingReturn the beans to the heat only long enough to coat them, under a minute. The dish is meant to accompany lesso — boiled beef — but suits any plain roasted or poached meat.
This is a vegetable dish built on a technique rather than a tradition: the yolk-and-lemon binding is the same liaison Italian cooks used for salsa d'uovo over asparagus, cardoons and fennel, and it is close kin to Greek avgolemono and to the French sauce poulette. Its presence here reflects the household economy of the period, in which a pot of boiled beef supplied both the Sunday meat and the broth that dressed its vegetables — nothing was bought for the sauce that the kitchen did not already have. A parallel, rather than a demonstrated source, can be found in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina (1891), where string beans in egg sauce appear in much the same form.