String Beans
String one quart of beans and cut them in inch lengths. Wash and drain. Melt a large tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, add one-half a teaspoonful of salt and one-quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper and the drained beans.. Cover closely and shake over the fire for ten minutes; add four tablespoonfuls of boiling water and draw a little to one side, where they will not cook so fast. As the water evaporates, add more, but never more than a few spoonfuls at a time. If the beans are tender they will cook tender in twenty-one minutes; if older, they may require as much as forty-five minutes. They are very tender and delicate. By way of variety, add a few spoonfuls of rich cream just before taking them from the fire.
A dry braise: the beans cook in butter and their own steam, with water added only a spoonful at a time. The method is sound, but the timings belong to a different bean.
- A quart of beansBeans were measured by volume in this period. A quart of cut green beans is roughly 1 lb, enough for four as a side dish.
- The timings are the thing to changeTwenty-one to forty-five minutes reflects the tougher, stringier snap-bean varieties of the period. Modern stringless beans will be crisp-tender in well under a third of that time by this method, and olive-drab and limp long before twenty minutes.
- Stringing is now optionalThe fibrous seam the recipe assumes has been bred out of most commercial beans since stringless varieties came in around the turn of the century. Snap off the stem ends and check one pod; if no string pulls away, skip the step.
- Never more than a few spoonfulsThis is the hinge. Too much water at once turns the dish into boiled beans and washes the butter off. Add 2 to 3 tablespoons at a time, keep the pan covered, and let it go nearly dry between additions.
- Draw a little to one sideOn a coal range this meant sliding the pan off the hottest plate. On a gas or induction hob, drop to low once the first water goes in.
- White pepperProbably specified so no dark specks show against the beans. Black pepper works and tastes stronger; use a scant quarter teaspoon.
- The cream variationStir in 2 to 3 tablespoons of rich cream off the heat, or with the pan barely at a simmer, as the recipe directs. Hard boiling risks the butter and cream separating into a greasy sauce.
String beans are a New World crop that is often said to have returned to American tables by way of European kitchen gardens, and by the end of the nineteenth century they were among the most common summer vegetables in the United States — cheap, prolific, and easy to put up in jars. The name records a real feature: until breeders selected it away, most varieties carried a tough fiber along the pod seam that had to be pulled off before cooking, which is why the recipe opens with the instruction to string them. The gentle butter-and-steam handling here, with cream added at the last moment, marks it as a genteel treatment of a plain vegetable, in keeping with turn-of-the-century cookbooks that were trying to persuade American households that vegetables deserved better than a long hard boil.