Beanie Boos!

Produce bins are starting to fill up with those tiny green snake look-alikes: green beans! Today, we're going to see what The Illustrated Encyclopedia of American Cooking (editors of Favorite Recipes Press, 1972) suggests we do with this summer bounty.

If you are like my mom-- a devotee of soups completely devoid of flavor-- then string bean soup might be the order of the day.

Okay, she'd leave out the onion so it would just be green beans cooked until tender and then boiled some more as the noodles cooked in the soup base of water thickened with a flour-and-shortening paste. Yum!

Going in the opposite direction, maybe Deviled Green Beans are more your style. At least deviled implies that some flavoring agent will be added.

I kind of expected deviled ham, or maybe mayonnaise and paprika (like deviled eggs), but here the beans are in an onion/ pepper/ tomato/ mustard/ cheese sauce. The peppers are of the not-spicy variety, so I guess the mustard is what makes this deviled?

Of course, no list of old recipes is complete without a loaf, so here's a Green Bean Loaf.

It might be better described as a saltine, tomato sauce, and green bean custard since it's in that milk and egg base, so if you think old recipes aren't really represented unless there's a custard in there somewhere, well, maybe this can check off both the loaf and the custard boxes.

We'll need a good dose of American cheese, too. Even though Green Beans with Walnut Sauce emphasizes the walnuts...

...it has more American cheese in the sauce than walnuts, so our American cheese-centric recipe slot is full.

Maybe you prefer vintage recipes that come under a puffy cloud of egg whites?

Well, I'm not sure how much the mayonnaise mixture will deflate the stiffly beaten egg white, but the condiment-and-egg-white hat is supposed to puff up over the green-bean-and-celery mixture in the oven.

And finally, no list of vintage recipes is complete without something Hawaiian, right?

Green Beans Aloha proves once again that people used to be willing to dump cans of pineapple into pretty much everything! Since this recipe calls specifically for canned beans, it may have been an attempt to make midwinter seem more like summer, what with the veggies that would have been fresh in summer and the tropical fruit....

I'm just going to enjoy actual summer while it's still here. Have a happy late-summer weekend and find a way to enjoy some fresh produce-- preferably not loafed, puffed, or deviled (unless that is your thing).