Stewed Green Beans

Ingredients

• essence of meat
• broth

Method

1. 1

   Prepare stewed scarlet runners with essence of meat, reducing their juice well.

2. 2

   French green beans should be stewed with broth for better flavor.

As published

This recipe was extracted from The spirit of cookery (1895) by Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Thudichum, page 212. The excerpt below is the record exactly as published.

essence of meat, and their juice should be well reduced. French green beans are very insipid when boiled in water, but when stetved with broth become an excellent dish. Green broad beans may also be plain- boiled, and accompanied with a sauce or stewed. Stewed green beans improve in taste by being warmed up, probably by concentration. Haricot beans are the fruit of Phaseolus vulgaris. It is related by ancient writers that the great mathematician Pythagoras ordered his disciples to abstain from beans. We have been unable to find any record of the grounds of that interdict, and are inclined to doubt the allegation. It is probable that the beans received the prefix of haricot from their being used in a stew called haut-ragoiU, gradually corrupted to haricot. These beans, ordinarily white and dry and hard, have of late years been brought into the market, in the month of November, in a green state. Many of those which we examined had rootlets. When stewed they looked and tasted much like the dry haricot similarly prepared. They had probably been treated like the barley for malting, made to germinate, but simultaneously exposed to light so as to become green. For the culinary preparation of haricots, it is essential that they should be swelled in soft luater — i.e., water free from 334 THE SPIRIT OF COOKERY chalk and gypsum, or carbonate and sulphate of lime. Dis- tilled water is the best. Eain water and river water may be used in places ; but when there is hard water only avail- able, it should be softened by being boiled for half an hour, with the addition of a small quantity of carbonate of soda, a lump of the size of a filbert being sufficient for a quart of water. Further, the soaking of the beans must be effected during a sufficiency of time, not less than eight hours, and preferably overnight— f.e., during from twelve to eighteen hours. The stewing then becomes an easy process. Broth

Cook this with the app: pantry check, scaling, and the assistant.