To Keep French Beans All the Year
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Gather young, spot-free beans on a dry day.
Clean and dry the beans.
Pack the jar
In a large stone jar, layer salt and beans alternately until full. Cover the top layer with salt.
Seal and store
Tie a coarse cloth over the jar, place a board on top, and add a weight to keep out air. Store the jar in a dry cellar.
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
- Young french beans
- Provide the vegetable being preserved, whose texture softens and flavor concentrates during salting.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the beans and inhibits spoilage microbes, preserving them through fermentation-free salting.
The step that matters
Keep out air with a weight. Beans must stay fully submerged in their own brine and sealed from air; exposed beans can spoil or grow mold. The cloth, board and weight hold the beans under the salt layer.
“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.
You might also like
Green Corn Pudding64 recipes
Cornmeal mush12 recipesThe free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.