These marbled pinkish beans are beautiful to look at raw
\nand not that tedious to hull. Once free of their pods,
\nthey need a parboil. As usual when boiling any liquids
\nexcept those to be sweetened, throw in garlic cloves
\nwith sprigs of your favourite herbs. Mine for the moment:
\nThai basil (the one with the purple stems which explode
\ninto packets of flower), bay leaf, thyme and tarragon.
\nLet all that linger in the pot to the tenderness you want,
\nmost importantly the beans, keeping an eye on the garlic.
\nCool them to a state of warmth, serve the beans on a bed
\nof greens dressed with pepper, salt, oil, vinegar, a dab
\nor two of mustard. Retrieve any garlic you put in the boil,
\npulp it and serve it as one condiment among others.
\nShelling beans fit naturally into a festive\u00a0mezze<\/i>\u00a0lunch,
\naccompanied by a slightly chilled low-alcohol red.
\nIf you have luck enough to have ros\u00e9 in the fridge,
\nput it on the table and invite your guests to blend
\ntheir own ideal red-ros\u00e9 to go with the beans.<\/p>\n
*** 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 … <\/p>\n
\nWhen 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\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n