Home › Tudor & Stuart Thanksgiving Series › Butter’d French Beans (1660)
Butter’d French Beans (1660) — Robert May’s Table Greens for a Holiday Feast
Part of the Tudor & Stuart Thanksgiving Series — exploring how early modern English cooks transformed simple vegetables into elegant side dishes fit for the season’s most abundant table.
A Gentle Dish for the Early-Modern Table
By the mid-17th century, “French beans” — the New World haricot — had become a fashionable vegetable in England. Robert May includes several recipes for them in The Accomplisht Cook (1660), treating them tenderly with butter, vinegar, and spice. They offer a luminous green note amid the roasts, puddings, pies, and rich sauces of the season — a perfect complement to a modern Thanksgiving table inspired by early modern English cookery.
Historical Context
New World Origins: Haricot beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) are native to Central and South America. Long before European contact, Indigenous farmers cultivated dozens of varieties—green beans, kidney beans, and shelling beans—across Mesoamerica and the Andes. They formed part of the “Three Sisters” agricultural system alongside maize and squash.
Arrival in Europe: Spanish explorers brought these New World beans to Europe in the early 1500s. By the 1530s they appear in Mediterranean gardens; by the 1550s they were fashionable in Italy and France, where they were prized for their thin, edible pods. England, following French horticultural fashion, adopted them slightly later—thus the English name “French beans.”
Adoption in England: By the late 1500s, green beans were grown in English kitchen gardens, though still considered something of an imported delicacy. Herbalists such as John Gerard (1597) describe “the French bean which cometh from beyond the seas,” distinguishing it from the older Old World broad bean (Vicia faba). These slender beans were more tender, easier to cook, and well suited to the new culinary trend of lightly prepared vegetables.
Why They Appear in May (1660): By Robert May’s time, French beans had become a regular feature in elite kitchens. His recipe aligns with the era’s preference for simple treatments—boiling, buttering, and seasoning—allowing the vegetable’s natural color and delicacy to shine. The touch of vinegar and nutmeg reflects early-modern taste for balancing “cold and moist” foods with warming spices.
From New World to Tudor Thanksgiving: The journey of the French bean—from Indigenous agriculture to Spanish ships, to French gardens, to English cookbooks—mirrors the broader Columbian Exchange that reshaped European foodways. Serving this dish at a modern Thanksgiving connects the contemporary holiday table with the very ingredients that transformed 17th-century English cooking.
Original Recipe
Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (London: 1660), p. 204.
Public link to the recipe on Archive.org
To stew French Beans.
Take your French beans and string them, then seeth them well in fair water; when they are tender, put them into a pipkin with some sweet butter, a little vinegar, pepper, and salt; and shake them well together. Serve them hot, with grated nutmeg cast upon them.
