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String Bean Sandwich
Cook string beans until tender; when cold, cut in small pieces, add a chopped onion, and a few chopped English walnut meats. Mix with a little French dressing and spread between lightly buttered slices of white bread, with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A cold-vegetable filling of the sort that filled out early twentieth-century sandwich books, where anything left from dinner became a lunch. Two words in it mean something different now.
- French dressingIn this period the name meant a plain vinaigrette: oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, beaten just before use. Ratios in period books vary, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar. It does not mean the sweet, tomato-tinted orange bottled dressing that took the name in America later.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut sold everywhere today. The distinction was drawn against the native American black walnut, which is far more assertive and would bully the beans.
- The onion"A chopped onion" against a modest quantity of beans is a great deal of raw onion. A tablespoon or two of finely minced onion, or a couple of scallions, gives the intended bite; more turns the sandwich sharp by the time it is eaten.
- Cook the beans less than the book expectsPeriod cookbooks commonly called for long boiling, well past the point where beans stay green; this one says only 'until tender'. Six to eight minutes in salted water, then straight into cold water, keeps them green and gives the filling some snap, which is the whole point of the walnuts and lettuce.
- Dry everythingBeans hold water in their hollows and dressing carries more. Drain and blot the cut beans before dressing them, dress lightly, and butter the bread to the edges. The butter is a moisture barrier as much as a flavour.
- QuantitiesAbout half a pound of beans, a handful of walnuts and two tablespoons of dressing fill four sandwiches. Dress no more than an hour ahead; the vinegar dulls the beans if it sits.
Sandwich books proliferated in America in the decades around 1900, when the sandwich moved from picnic makeshift towards the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the packed lunch pail. Their logic was frankly economical: a cupful of cold cooked vegetable, an oil-and-vinegar dressing and a nut for texture turned yesterday's dinner into today's meal, and a lettuce leaf laid between filling and bread recurs throughout the genre, plausibly to keep dressing off the crumb. String beans were a common garden and home-canned vegetable of the period, and recipes like this one belong to a broader turn-of-the-century interest in salads and cold vegetables as light, modern eating, encouraged by the domestic-science writers of the day.