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Pickles

Pickled French beans preserved in coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Pickles

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Pack the keg

  1. Pick young French beans and layer them in a wooden keg, three inches deep.

  2. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt over each layer of beans.

  3. Continue layering beans and salt until the keg is full, but do not use too much salt.

  4. Place a plate or wooden cover on top of the beans and weigh it down with a heavy stone.

Pickle and serve

  1. Allow the beans to pickle in the salt.

  2. When ready to eat, cut, soak, and boil the beans as if they were fresh.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

French beans
Provide the vegetable itself, which is preserved and later cooked as fresh beans.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the beans and preserves them through the pickling process.

The step that matters

Continue layering beans and salt until the keg is full, but do not use too much salt.. Salt must be spread evenly through the layers to preserve the beans; too little allows spoilage, while too much makes them overly salty and harder to prepare later.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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