Member-only story
Mrs Bailey’s Szechuan Green Beans
From Marsport’s Chinatown, direct to you…
Green beans, Chinese long beans, haricots verts: through the season, Mrs Bailey’s poor harassed kitchenmaids trim a lot of beans. Perhaps half of every crop is pickled or otherwise preserved for the long Martian winters ahead, but while they’re fresh, they appear at school meals raw or barely blanched in many a salad, crisply al dente or slow-stewed with tomatoes and garlic as a regular side dish.
This particular recipe falls halfway between those last two, spending ten or fifteen minutes on the heat. She ate the dish first in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on a back alley in Marsport’s Chinatown, for she is nothing if not adventurous in pursuit of her passion, and recreated it through trial and — well, not error, because she doesn’t make errors in respect to food, but through several refinements, let us say.
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon garlic chilli sauce (or, of course, more, depending on tolerance)
a splash of peanut oil
1 pound green beans, trimmed (and halved if you like, to make them easier to serve)
as much garlic as you want, crushed
sesame seeds
sesame oil
In a small bowl, combine soy sauce, honey, garlic chilli sauce and 1 tablespoon water.
Heat oil in a large skillet (preferably cast iron), then add the green beans. Toss them in the oil and then leave them undisturbed for a few minutes, until they start to char lightly. Toss them, and again let them sit a few minutes. Toss once more and cook tilll they are blistered and tender.
Lower the heat, add garlic and sauté until fragrant. Turn off the heat and pour the sauce into the pan, letting the residual heat cook it off, tossing the beans until they are thoroughly coated. Salt to taste, scatter with sesame seeds and drizzle over a little sesame oil, and serve.
You can find many more of Mrs Bailey’s recipes here: