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Puree of String Beans
(Italy.) Pick and string and cut up 1 pint of beans, parboil, and strain them, and add 1 pint white stock and 2 ounces butter mixed with 2 ounces flour. Cook 20 minutes, season, and press through a sieve. Add 1 cup of hot cream or rich milk and serve.
A straightforward velouté-style vegetable soup: beans cooked in stock thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, sieved, then finished with cream. A blender does in thirty seconds what the sieve was for.
- What "1 pint of beans" meansA pint here is a volume measure of cut green beans, something like 8 oz by weight. Buy a pound of fresh beans and you will have enough after topping and stringing.
- StringingMost modern green bean cultivars are bred stringless, so the stringing step is usually unnecessary. Snap off the stem ends and cut into inch lengths.
- Parboil and strainTwo to three minutes in salted water is enough; the beans cook again for twenty minutes in the stock. "Strain" means drain, not sieve. Save the water if your stock is thin.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark beef stock, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- The rouxEqual weights butter and flour, 2 oz each, is a heavy thickening for a pint of stock — this will be a thick purée rather than a thin soup. Cook the roux a minute or two without colouring before the liquid goes in, and whisk the stock in gradually or it will lump.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve gives the smoothest result and removes bean skins; a blender followed by a quick pass through a fine strainer gets you most of the way in a fraction of the time.
- Finishing with creamAdd the hot cream off the heat or over very low heat and do not let the soup boil afterward. Boiling after the cream goes in risks separation and dulls the fresh bean flavour.
- ColourTwenty minutes of simmering turns green beans olive-drab. If you want a green soup, hold back a handful of the parboiled beans, refresh them in cold water, and blend them in at the end.
- YieldAbout a quart finished — four small first-course servings. Check the salt at the end; the recipe seasons before sieving.
Cookbooks of this period often gathered soups by nation, and the "(Italy.)" tag here is doing the work of a whole travel narrative. The method itself, however, is French: a white roux loosened with pale stock, cooked, sieved and enriched with cream is the standard purée of the classical repertoire, applied in turn to peas, asparagus, celery and beans. What marks it as Italian in the compiler's mind is likely the vegetable. The sieve is the period detail that dates the recipe most sharply: before electric blenders, every smooth soup meant a cook pressing hot pulp through a tammy or a wire sieve with a wooden spoon.