This is the time of year when the cogitative vegetable grower pays special homage to Native American horticulture, particularly its brilliant triad of beans, squash and sweet corn. We’re bullish on all three at our place, but I want to beam in specifically on beans. Our garden isn’t warm enough for long enough to grow the all-conquering soy bean from China or India’s admirable mung bean. And somehow the Japanese azuki bean has never gotten a toehold in our vegie patch. We do however grow a considerable crop of broad beans, those delicious big buttery customers native to the Mediterranean area. For the rest we rely on so-called New World beans, developed in Mexico, Central and South America, and almost all of them roughly lumped together as varieties of Phaseolus vulgaris.
No sooner are the broad beans picked, shelled and popped into the freezer, than the wax beans are ready. Snap beans, string beans, call them what you will, these are one of the most widely eaten vegetables in North America today, and those of us who grow them know precisely why -- it’s all but impossible to limit their production to a sensible amount. I’ve downsized from planting a whole bed of them to just a single row, and there are still far too many. Oft-repeated bean and zuchini salads become the avenging angels of summertime cuisine.
This year, half the row was devoted to a yellow variety called Golden Rocky, or in polite society Beau de Reaucancourt. The other half to Totem, a long and slender green French filet bean. We grow only bush beans, which invlove less work than pole beans and by their dense growth habit keep the soil moist. On the down side, none of the bush types freezes as well as the romano bean -- the flat- podded “Italian” pole bean -- that is hailed as superior to all others in both flavour and texture and retains both better when frozen. Closely related to the romano, producing almost as fine a bean, scarlet runners are fast growing, prodigiously climbing plants that perform well in a variety of climates and bear beautiful scarlet orange flowers as a bonus.
When Jaques Cartier and company sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1535, they encountered indigenous farmers cultivating “kidney beans -- black, red, white and spotted.” We strive for a similar mix in our dried beans. I usually grow a row of Black Coco, a plump and shiny black bean that makes excellent refried beans. Interestingly, the black bean never became popular in Europe, but did in already bean-rich China. Anytime I’m close to Chinatown in Vancouver, I try buy a bag of black bean cakes, filled with a sweetened black bean paste that is to die for.
The sweetening of beans was also the genius behind New England (or Boston) baked beans. In this familiar dish, the small white beans that became known as navy beans from their use on British and American warships are first cooked and then slowly baked with brown sugar, honey, molasses or syrup. The tinned Pork ‘n Beans available on supermarket shelves, for all their comfort food virtues, fall grotesquely short of home grown baked beans.
For red kidney beans we grow a robust strain called Montcalm, and this year rounded out the bean beds with Speckled Bays, which are cream coloured with red speckling. One should also have a row of Cannellini, the small white beans required for authentic minestrone soup. And you could have a row of Jacob’s Cattle or Yellow Eye or Lord knows how many others.
The growing of beans -- while lacking the high drama of, say, aubergines, or the instant gratification of vine-ripened tomatoes -- is commendable on three counts:
First, they are extremely easy to cultivate, requiring only warm soil for germination and a modest supply of water during bean formation. Plus as a legume they fix nitrogen in the soil. Only in harvesting dried types must real care be taken, to ensure that the beans are absolutely dry, when they rattle in their pods and begin to spill onto the ground.
Second: beans are unarguably fundamental to a healthy diet and a healthier planet, about which no more need be said.
Third: a row of glass jars stocked with home-grown beans promises mid-winter subtleties of taste and texture unimaginable to those condemned to know only the bland indifferences of post-industrial dried beans.
