Not THAT Green Bean Casserole

My dear friend Byron had five heart attacks, rat-a-tat-tat, one Sunday afternoon. When they finally let him out of the hospital, he asked me to teach him to cook. I basically told him to de-glop his life.

In the big picture, there is nothing quite so gloppy as that canned-green-bean casserole everybody plops onto the Thanksgiving table. Between the canned beans and the canned soup and the canned, french fried onion rings, the sodium levels are circling Venus. It is one of those foods that are simply carriers for salt. And if you're eating the least widdle bit circumspectly and healthy the rest of the year, this casserole is not going to do a thing for you—except making you puffy and deathly thirsty the next day.

Enter "The Winter Kitchen," by Louise Andrews Kent and Elizabeth Kent Gay (Houghton, Mifflin Co., Boston, 1962). This book should be called, "What Would Mrs. Appleyard Do?" It is one of those old cookbooks that you can read like a novel. There're slyly funny little vignettes before each recipe, describing Mrs. Appleyard's rural Vermont life. What Mrs. Appleyard would do with the ubiquitous green beans is:

1. Start with fresh green beans. Cook them until just tender.

2. Use fresh mushrooms, and ditch the soup for fresh onion, and a little slap of butter and cream. Thus creating a (gasp!) homemade mushroom sauce, in which you (gasp!) control the salt, the quantity of sauce, the add-ins (nutmeg, a little sherry, or jalapeño peppers). Mrs. Appleyard notes that this sauce is also good with broccoli, lima beans, Brussels sprouts, and shell beans.

Here's the recipe:

Green Beans and Mushrooms

(serves eight)

2 pounds fresh green beans
1 tsp. fine minced yellow onion
2 Tbl. or less real butter
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 pound fresh mushrooms, caps cut in two and stems sliced thin
1 Tbl. flour
1/2 tsp. paprika
salt or salt substitute to taste
1/2 cup or less cream

Cook beans until just tender. Saute onion in the butter until straw colored. Add the mushrooms and cook 4-5 minutes, stirring well. Sprinkle in the flour, mixed with the seasonings. Blending it in. Do all this over very low heat. Turn off the heat, and add the cream. The standing heat will warm the cream. Add this mixture to the beans and stir well. Serve hot.


I love old cookbooks, especially from the early 60's. I call them "P.C." = Pre-Cholesterol. They give you a good place to start, if you want to cook fresh and you want to cook at home (and have a grocery bill less than one-arm, one-leg). And if you love to tinker with recipes, start with a solid old cookbook. I have been making all my own salad dressings and sauces for about ten years now. These books know how. Because they didn't, back then, have all night grocery stores or all of the prepared, shelf-stable stuff we have now. But nowadays you really do not have to be part of the thundering herd that spends five bucks on something you can make at home for 45 cents.

Here's a quick test: Pick that grocery item up. Look at the expiration date. If it says, "Best used before June 1, 2022," put it back down and walk away.

Yum-yum,

Janelle