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To Boil String Beans
Put the prepared beans in boiling salted water, boil gently (about fifteen minutes), drain, add just enough boiling water to cover the beans, simmer gently till tender, let the water evaporate, as the beans become sufficiently cooked, add sweet cream and season with salt and pepper.
A two-stage method: an open boil, then a covered simmer that reduces to almost nothing before cream is stirred in. The technique still works, but the timing belongs to a bean that no longer exists in most markets.
- The hinge: don't cook them twiceThe original expects a stringy, thick-walled pod that needed a long total cooking: fifteen minutes of open boiling plus an unspecified simmer "till tender." Modern stringless varieties are tender in a few minutes of open boiling. Boil until just yielding, then move straight to the reduction step rather than repeating a long simmer.
- "Prepared beans"In this period it meant snapping off both ends and pulling the fibrous string down the seam. Today only the stem end needs removing; the string was bred out of common green beans over the twentieth century.
- Boil gently, uncoveredOpen boiling is traditionally said to help the beans hold their colour. Salt the water well; surface seasoning from a cream finish is not the same thing.
- The evaporation stepAdding just enough water to cover and letting it cook away concentrates whatever the beans give up during the second, gentler cooking. Watch it near the end; once the pan is nearly dry the beans scorch quickly.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" here means unsoured, as opposed to the soured or clabbered cream common in the period. Use heavy or whipping cream. Two to three tablespoons for a pound of beans is enough to gloss them; more turns it into a sauce.
- Don't boil the cream hardAdd it off the heat or over a low flame and swirl until it thickens slightly. A hard boil in a nearly dry pan will break it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. A pound of beans treated this way serves four as a side dish.
String beans — the immature pods of Phaseolus vulgaris, eaten pod and all — were a summer staple in American kitchens long before the stringless bean arrived. Breeding work in the late nineteenth century produced pods without the tough fibre along the seam, and in time the name "string bean" outlived the string itself; "green bean" and "snap bean" gradually displaced it. The long cooking here is not carelessness but a fair reading of the vegetable as it then was, and the finish with sweet cream reflects a household where cream was a daily commodity rather than an occasional purchase. Bright, briefly cooked vegetables are largely a later idea, arriving with better varieties, faster stoves and, it is often said, the nutritional arguments of the early twentieth century.