"It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them, -- the last was the hardest of all, -- I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans." -- Thoreau, Walden
Do you read heirloom seed catalogs? Having spent many happy hours doing so both as an education and in preparation for ordering seeds, I've noticed that some list dozens and dozens of old bean varieties. They have great names and the text sings their praises but I always thought, "They're just beans, right? Besides different colors outside, what does it all amount to? Not much of a hill of beans, right" Wrong: it turns out that dried beans can be a revelation! A wonder to eat and a delight to smell, they display a great variety in texture, firmness and flavor. And they can be easy to digest. Whodathunk?
This winter I have climbed to the mountaintop and I have had my revelation... and here it is: we have been robbed. Yes, robbed -- yet again -- by the industrial agriculture practice where we get crap for dried beans: stuff that is as dull as dust but easy (and profitable) for the farmers and grocers. We no longer know the flavor and the savor of dried beans.
Our next-door gardening partners last year bought a bunch of seeds, including a box of 6 different types of dried beans from SeedSavers.org -- 1 lb each. They puzzled the heck out of me all year because for some bizarre reason, they didn't have any planting or growing info on them -- just how to cook them.
I planted several of them out over the summer and got poor germination on all but one variety: Good Mother Stallard. Good Mother grew wonderfully and made absolutely marvelous string beans -- the best I've ever had -- and I accidentally set a lot of seed. You know -- you don't find the pods until they're too big to eat as snaps or strings... so why not let them set beans for drying? Finally this fall it dawned on me: these beans weren't packaged for planting, they were packaged for cooking! I'm guessing Seed Savers Exchange took leftover seed that was not fresh enough to sell for planting, and they sold it for eating. Thus the lack of planting info on the packaging.
So, that's what I've been doing: getting to know beans by eating them. Each time I made a different variety, preparing them identically so we can tell what the beans themselves taste like. I presoaked them in boiled water for some hours. I fried a little bacon, onion, carrot, green pepper, celery leaf, and thyme. Add the beans and their soaking water (there's a lot of nutrients in that water; don't throw it away), and cook covered until fork tender. I often made cornbread and greens to eat along side -- the cornbread and pot liquor from the beans being just heaven together.
The first ones I made were Lina Cisco Bird Egg beans. They were the best beans I'd ever tasted! I've been giving a bit to our gardening neighbor each week so she could see what she thought about them, too. She asked me if I had added some exotic Indian spices to the Lina Ciscos, because there was so much amazing flavor -- she loved it! Even her 5-year-olds loved it. She was as astonished as I was to find out that the "exotic" flavor is in the beans themselves!
This coming year I will be growing bean for drying not just in our gardens, but in the Thoreau Farm kitchen garden I'm starting at the birth house (all varieties there will be pre 1878, the date of the house exterior restoration). Some of them have New England histories. Here are the varieties I will be growing for dried beans in one or both locations.
Good Mother Stallard • Irish Creek Annie • Mayflower* • Christmas Lima* • Hutterite Soup* • Scarlet Runner • Vermont CranberryI've made five varieties of beans already. Irish Creek Annie and the Lina Ciscos were my favorites so far -- I still have the Good Mother Stallards to try, as well as the Scarlet Runner beans we also grew. Oh, and not one episode of gassiness for any of us after eating beans as the main course of these meals. Amazing grace, indeed!
* Boarded on the US Slow Food Ark of Taste. All Ark members are outstanding in terms of taste--as defined in the context of local traditions and uses; at risk biologically or as culinary traditions; sustainably produced; culturally or historically linked to a specific region, locality, ethnicity or traditional production practice; produced in limited quantities by farms or by small-scale processing companies. See http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/details/ark_of_taste/ for more info about the Ark.
