Has bean: french bean & tomato relish

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french bean & tomato relish

The thing that has surprised me most with this year’s first steps in growing vegetables has been just how many beans you get from a few plants tucked in amongst the flowers. First to crop were the dwarf beans, then the runner beans kicked in (and have been amazingly productive, even climbing over the fence into next door’s garden and supplying our lovely neighbour with a few beans). We thought our french beans were a failure, but in fact they were just later coming into production than everything else, and are now also cropping well.

So having tamed our tomatoes, the beans had to have my attention next. I searched the internet but almost every recipe I came up with was basically the same rather dull-looking old WI recipe, trotted out under different names but all apparently designed to produce a thin, mustardy, vinegary ‘piccalilli’-style of preserve, which wasn’t what I wanted.

So I decided to create my own, almost ‘sweet & sour’ French Bean & Tomato Relish. It’s a softer set than the chutney I was making, and I feel that it makes the most of the beans themselves and will be a great accompaniment to British cheeses or cold meats.

David’s French Bean & Tomato Relish

1kg french beans, topped, tailed and cut into 2.5cm pieces
1.3kg red tomatoes, quartered
2 medium onions (400g unpeeled weight)
1 tsp salt
100g unpeeled weight fresh ginger root, finely chopped
8 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 tsp ground white pepper
seeds of 15 cardamom pods
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp fenugreek seeds
3 dried red chillies
500ml white malt vinegar

575g soft dark or Demerara sugar
25g cornflour, slaked with a very little water

Chop the tomatoes and onions and put in a large heavy pan. Add everything but the beans, sugar and cornflour and stew for 1-1½ hours until much reduced. Meanwhile, drop the beans into boiling water and cook until just tender; drain, and throw into a large quantity of iced cold water, to halt the cooking. When quite cold, drain again. Add the sugar to the reduced tomato mixture and cook down for 20 minutes; add the beans, cook until hot, then spoon out 300ml of the cooking liquid; mix with the slaked cornflour, return to the pan, and cook for 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, make sure your jam jars are washed and clean, and sterilise them by putting them in an oven at 140C for at least 10 minutes. Then fill your jars with the hot pickle and cover immediately. If you use acid- and vinegar-proof screw-top metal lids, the relish will retain its moisture content and remain quite soft, but if you use cellophane covers held in place with elastic bands, some of the moisture will gradually evaporate, giving you a denser pickle.

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The loneliness of the long distance runner bean

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abundant and starkly beautiful, runner beans suit all manner of pickles and relishes

Runner Bean Mustard Pickle:

It’s odd how sometimes mentioning something, even to dismiss it, can spark a smouldering interest which you find yourself returning to later; and having sorted out my french bean surplus without resorting to the ‘piccalilli’ solution, I still needed to do something with my continuing bumper crop of runner beans. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of making a mustard pickle for the store cupboard, but to be honest, most of the recipes I found on the internet had an almost 1950s-austerity-period parsimony to them – as though the idea was to eke out the supply of beans and flavours, rather than pack them into the available jars.

I looked at the Delia recipe for spiced pickled runner beans, which seemed to be directly related to a much older WI recipe, and a Welsh recipe which mercifully came with an English translation but like everything else I found, they didn’t seem to pack the punch of either beans or spices that I was looking for. So I used these as my starting point, and by increasing the quantity of both beans and spices (compared to vinegar and sugar), arrived at the following, pungent, bean-packed pickle:

David’s Runner Bean Mustard Pickle

25g plain flour
140g English mustard powder (Colman’s)
30g celery salt
15g turmeric
100g dried garlic flakes
900ml white malt vinegar
25g black mustard seed, ‘popped’ in
1 tbsp sunflower oil
1.25kg runner beans
500g Demerara or other pale brown sugar

Combine the flour, mustard powder, celery salt, turmeric and dried garlic with 600ml of the vinegar in a large bowl, to form a thin paste. Heat the oil in a saucepan with a lid and ‘pop’ the mustard seeds.

Top and tail the beans and ‘string’ them if necessary, then chop them on the diagonal into 2.5-4.0cm pieces; drop into a very large pan of boiling water, return to the boil, cook for 15 minutes and drain. Return the beans to the pan and pour the remaining vinegar over them, to help preserve the colour.

Add the mustard seeds and oil, and then the paste, and stir everything together gently but thoroughly. Return to the heat, add the sugar and cook for 10-15 minutes until the sugar has fully dissolved and the whole mixture is bubbling gently, making sure it doesn’t stick and that the raw flour taste is cooked out.

Meanwhile, sterilise your jars by washing them inside and out in hot soapy water; rinse well, dry, arrange in a roasting tin and heat in the oven at 140ºC for 10 minutes. Put the roasting tin on a heatproof surface and fill the jars with the very hot chutney, and cover immediately.

If you use acid- and vinegar-proof screw-top metal lids, the chutney will retain its moisture content and remain quite soft, but if you use cellophane covers held in place with elastic bands, some of the moisture will gradually evaporate, giving you a denser chutney.

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Runner Bean & Pepper Relish

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the beans still have some crispness in the pickle

Just after Christmas is hardly the time to be making chutney with anything from your garden (unless someone has invented Brussels Sprout chutney, there may be an opening there!), but late in the season I did make a batch of Runner Bean & Pepper Relish, using up some of our late runner bean harvest and a load of peppers I’d bought at a market. This has been very popular with the people I gave it to, so for future reference I’m posting it here.

David’s Runner Bean & Pepper Relish

570g runner beans, trimmed, de-stringed and cut diagonally into chunks
1kg red tomatoes, quartered
6 peppers, 850g unprepped weight
2 medium onions, 450g unprepped weight
100g fresh root ginger, unpeeled weight
8 cloves of garlic
6 dried red chillies
2tsp fine sea salt
3tsp ground white pepper
Seeds of 15 green cardamom pods
3tsp ground cumin
3tsp fenugreek seeds
500ml white vinegar
600g white sugar

The method is really on the same lines as the chutney and relish recipes I posted last year.

Drop the chunks of runner beans into a pan of boiling water and cook until just tender. Then drain, and throw into a bowl of iced water, to halt the cooking. When cold, drain again.

Meanwhile, put the quartered tomatoes into a large pan. Trim the peppers, removing stalks and white pith, and dice to about the size of a man’s smallest fingernail; peel and chop the onions, likewise; peel and finely chop the fresh ginger and the garlic cloves, and add these ingredients to the tomatoes, with the chillies, spices and white vinegar. Cook until soft and reduced in bulk by 35-50%, stirring regularly to avoid any sticking, then add the white sugar, and continue to stir until it has again reduced by maybe one-third. Add the drained cold beans and cook until everything is hot and bubbling.

Meanwhile, sterilise your jam jars in a warm oven at 140ºC for at least 10 minutes. Remove jars from the oven, cool for a few minutes, then pour in the hot chutney, and cover. If you use acid- and vinegar-proof screw-top metal lids, the relish will retain its moisture content and remain quite soft, but if you use cellophane covers held in place with elastic bands, some of the moisture will gradually evaporate, giving you a denser pickle.

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