welcome friends welcome to another Sunday morning where we do recipes out
of old cookbooks and so far we've been really sort of concentrating on those
Depression years 1928 to 1938 and so today we're going to do another recipe
out of a guide to good cooking by the five roses flour company and we're gonna
make something called country beans now before I get into the recipe I think
it's funny I've done a couple of recipes out of this book over the last couple of
weeks and a lot of Canadians have gotten in touch with me and said oh no we
didn't have the five roses book because our family only used purity flowers so
we had the purity flour cookbooks and other people saying oh no we didn't use
either of those because my grandmother wanted to use Robin Hood's so we only
use the Robin Hood cookbooks we're gonna get to those we're gonna sort of over
the next couple of months break out of the Depression era and look at cookbooks
a little bit wider time period anyway today's recipe kind of excites me so it
is in this cookbook but it doesn't appear in the next version from 1938
which is this reg one our copies a little bit ragged it's not in there and
I look at this recipe as not a recipe at all it is a very basic basic vegetable
dish that sort of to me delineates the difference between those people who
lived in the cities and could not or didn't know how to grow their own
vegetables and those people that lived in rural areas or we don't even live in
a rural area we're in the suburbs but we still have a garden who could grow their
own food and also knew how to can to preserve for the winter so everything
here in front of me except for the salt and pepper Julie and I grew or made
ourselves so this is our own home cured bacon and you can find that recipe
elsewhere on our Channel and I'm just going to fry this off you want to brown
it and render out the fat okay so that's looking good now we're just going to
take this bacon now we just want to take the bacon out you want to leave the
grease behind in the pan cuz next in we're going to fry these
onions in the bacon grease and these are onions from our garden so you know I
just go right out pick one and onions were the kind of
thing that they were always cheap whether you grew them or not and they're
one of those crops that you could put in the root cellar and you could have it
all winter until next year's crop was ready so onions were definitely one of
those things that you would eat all the time so we just fry these onions until
they're translucent and they're looking pretty good so next in are these
tomatoes and so these are tomatoes that we grew in our garden last summer and
then canned last fall so it calls for one cup of canned tomatoes this is two
cups worth something to put about half in growing up one of the things that we
had all the time was a can or a jar of our own canned tomatoes and my mom would
cook it and she would just toss in stale bread and it was something that she ate
as a child that my grandmother ate during the Depression and it was you
know I think back on anything it was just so simple but yet I loved it and I
still loved it and today if I've got some stale bread I put it in the
tomatoes it's something that I absolutely love as a as a side dish or
just as lunch it's better than soup to me anyway so we just cook this now and
we cook it down just a little bit next in it calls for can of string beans one
tin of stringless beans now it would be too easy to assume that this would be a
can of string beans that you would buy at a grocery store for a lot of people
it would be beans that they can themselves from last summer and
certainly that's something that we would do because nine months of the year you
couldn't get fresh beans but when fresh beans are in season like they are right
now and I can just walk her to my garden and pick them that's what I did so I'm
going to use fresh beans but certainly canned beans from last summer would have
been perfect so they go in and they just get cooked in the tomato sauce now I'm
gonna put a lid on to let the beans steam because I'm using fresh beans they
need to be steamed a little bit if you're using canned beans of course
you just need to heat them through now the recipe does say that you can use
fresh beans but it goes on to talk about how you should cook them ahead of time
and if you go farther into the book it advocates boiling beans for 20 to 30
minutes until they're tender and I got to tell you 20 minutes of boiling beans
fresh green string beans they just be mush and I just I can't do that so I'm
gonna let them steam for probably 2 minutes 3 minutes and and they should be
the way that I like them a little bit of pepper on top and sprinkle on the bacon
a little bit more bacon joy this is the best part about summer yeah yes so fresh
fresh fresh everything tastes great so fresh beans from the garden tomatoes
that we put down from our garden it's gonna be drippy better than that
no I appreciate the bacon in it yeah I'm curious was it in the original recipe or
is this a okay it was in the recipe saying when once
add bacon moment nope the bacon was in there so you fried off the onion in the
bacon grease okay and I just made everything so salty taste I think you
need this cold or hot almost yeah it's like a stinking hot day you can have it
like it you can cooler you can put that you could chill that and take it to a
picnic as a cold salad yeah yeah or serve it at a barbecue as a cold salad
all right a cold side to just yeah definitely for summertime and then in
the winter time you could use everything can because you would can your own beans
you would yeah onion sir yeah are stored so this I think is a
wonderful recipe wouldn't you know have to have I know but I'm gonna make a mess
um you know and have some bread like a really nice loaf of your grandmother's
crusty bread farm bread dip it in the tomato sauce to stop up
the extra sauce just absolutely wonderful so I think this is a recipe
that even though it's it's in a depression-era cookbook and it doesn't
appear in any of the later cookbooks you know so by the time you get to the 1938
version seven it's not in there it's done it's gone and I don't know if
that's something because the recipe is forgotten because it is so plain or the
recipe doesn't need to be in a book anymore because everybody knows it
doesn't make it yeah that's part of it right that's that everybody just knows
what do you need ready game for so give it a try find some fresh beans get some
canned tomatoes and these are stewed tomatoes so they were stewed with onion
and celery and pepper and so it's not just a canned tomato it's a stewed
canned tomato absolutely fantastic thanks for stopping by I just keep
looking around in a circle for some reason see you again soon might be all
the fruit flies the fruit flies in here today were driving me nuts
you