These marbled pinkish beans are beautiful to look at raw
and not that tedious to hull. Once free of their pods,
they need a parboil. As usual when boiling any liquids
except those to be sweetened, throw in garlic cloves
with sprigs of your favourite herbs. Mine for the moment:
Thai basil (the one with the purple stems which explode
into packets of flower), bay leaf, thyme and tarragon.
Let all that linger in the pot to the tenderness you want,
most importantly the beans, keeping an eye on the garlic.
Cool them to a state of warmth, serve the beans on a bed
of greens dressed with pepper, salt, oil, vinegar, a dab
or two of mustard. Retrieve any garlic you put in the boil,
pulp it and serve it as one condiment among others.
Shelling beans fit naturally into a festive mezze lunch,
accompanied by a slightly chilled low-alcohol red.
If you have luck enough to have rosé in the fridge,
put it on the table and invite your guests to blend
their own ideal red-rosé to go with the beans.
***
When recipes are well-written, they are well-written prose. Richard Olney remains for me the master of the genre, though I do appreciate Elizabeth David’s mode, as well as others too numerous to mention here. Yet I have always mused about how a recipe might read in poetry. Below, in Warm Cranberry Bean Salad, as in any recipe, much goes unspoken, the actual real-world operations which produce something to eat. These are founded on the senses, perception of them and, when the right moment comes, esthetic judgment. Even the most humdrum cookbook instructions, including the videos proliferating on the web, only hint at what happens as we cook. Poetry too is an art of leaving as much as possible unsaid, and about the right moment to leave off.
