Three-Bean Salad Sandwiches. Tom McCorkle for The Washington Post; food styling by Gina Nistico for The Washington Post I can no more remember the first time I tasted a three-bean salad than I can remember the first time I breathed. It’s always been there, at every picnic, every cookout of my life, as unchanging as the air.
And for the longest time, I loved it. My mother, like so many of her generation, would combine three kinds of canned beans – including green – in a sweet-tart (let’s be honest: mostly sweet) dressing, along with chopped onions and celery. But as I grew up and my palate matured, I had to admit a problem with the whole concept: I loathe canned green beans.
Where other beans can still maintain their taste and texture when canned – I consider them one of the best convenience products you can buy – I find the green ones mushy and relatively flavorless, especially when compared to the freshly cooked version. I updated the dish when I wrote my 2020 cookbook, “Cool Beans.” For that, I roasted fresh wax beans along with garlic cloves, using the soft garlic in a dressing that includes a lot less sugar than my mother’s did.
I added a fistful of parsley and topped the salad with feta, and have made it that way for years. Recently, though, when I started craving three-bean salad, I wanted it in sandwich form. After all, if a picnic classic is good eaten with a fork, wouldn’t it be even better between slices of bread? One of the charms of three-bean .
