When
my review copy of Beans: A History by Ken Albala arrived, I wasn’t
particularly excited. What’s to know about beans?
Handy little pellets of veggie protein, come in various colours, look
pretty in jars on my kitchen shelf. But when at last I opened
the book and read the author’s introduction,
I was immediately hooked.
‘To really understand beans, to become one with my subject, I resolved
to eat beans every single day, ideally a new species or variety with every meal.
Soon my cabinets were bulging with heirloom
appaloosas, delicate Spanish Tolosanos, football-shaped lablabs,
specimens
from the far-flung corners of the globe, from tiny teparies to
mammoth Greek gigandas.There followed regular visits to ethnic
grocery stores, especially Indian for every form of dhal, hours
spent hulling
and peeling fresh favas, and frenzied Internet bean
forays in the middle of the night. I munched pickled lupines for
breakfast,
snacked on Japanese wasabi peas, frightened the children with sticky
natto,
and with nearly every supper I pulled out the brimming bean pot.
Chickpea flour panisses, South Indian dhosas, African bean fritters
followed suit.There was always a bowl or two of beans soaking with
zen-like patience on the countertop. I made it about
a year before giving up. I still try a new bean every week or so,
but I am happy
to say, my system is relieved to be done with this prolonged
and sometimes gruelling experiment. No matter what anyone says,
tolerance for
the bean and its gaseous effects does not develop over time.You
just get used to bloat. At least I can say I am full of beans.’
What a great combination of scholarly commitment and good humour!
Beans seem to grow everywhere. The book approaches the plethora
of varieties by geography, with chapters about the lentils of the
Fertile Crescent, lupines and limas of the Andes, Africa’s
black-eyed peas, Indian mung beans, and many, many more. There
are, in fact, over 18,000 species of beans, with more being
identified every day. Any plant that produces seed in distinctive
leguminous pods is classed as a bean – so that includes liquorice,
tamarind, carob, jicama, fenugreek and peanuts – not nuts
at all. Garden favourite like lupins produce peas that are, arguably,
not completely
poisonous,
but please don’t attempt anything with them
it until you’ve read this book!
‘We shall not even dare to dwell on the most heinous of poisonous criminals,
the Calabar bean (Physostigma venenosum) from West Africa,which is never used
as food, but rather as an “ordeal
bean” given to victims suspected of witchcraft. Only the
rare few who survive its lethal poison are exonerated. It is also
said
that people “duel” with
these beans, chomping one and seeing who survives, a kind of all-natural
Russian roulette.’
I don’t want to cause any offence, but you can’t write
a book, or a feature, about the history of beans without mentioning
the fact that they … well… they make you… you
know. Wherever beans are consumed, there is an associated folk
remedy
to prevent flatulence.The Mexicans use epazote, a herb. In India
they recommend asafoetida (‘Stinking Hay’),
which Albala describes as ‘a rank-smelling resin’.
In Japan they use seaweed, in Europe, garlic, and in the Middle
East, cumin.There’s
no evidence that any of these is much help. It looks as if this
unfortunate property has added to the strange
stigma attached to beans – there is a suggestion that those
lucky enough to dine amongst polite society would never dream of
eating
beans, for fear of indelicate consequences. Byzantine author
Michael Psellus claimed that even lingering in a bean field
might send poisonous fumes into one’s head,
leading to confusion and lethargy.
‘ Eating fava beans was not merely a matter of slight discomfort and possible
embarrassment, but a complete disruption of the whole physiological mechanism.Again,
hot herbs and aromatics offer some correction,
but beans are inherently dangerous and best left to common folk
with stronger stomachs and those less concerned with
clear and rational thought.’
Pythagorus was a well-known vegetarian and before the word ‘vegetarian’ was
coined, those abstaining from meat and fish were known as Pythagoreans.
But Pythagorus imposed
a strict ban on bean-eating. The reasons for this aren’t
clear – some say he may have suffered a genetic
disorder which made it dangerous for him to eat beans. Others have
suggested that he believed there was some association between beans
and souls – beans
contained souls.
In one Roman religious rite:
‘ the father of the household goes out barefoot at midnight and tosses beans
over his shoulder saying nine times “shades of my
ancestors, depart” while banging on pots.The beans and the
souls they contain are meant to substitute for the family members
whom the
ghosts might snatch, or the ghosts consume the spirits contained
in the beans
and are sated. Remarkably this festival was later converted to
All Saint’s Day in the seventh century, originally May
13 and only later moved to coincide with the Celtic holiday which
we
celebrate as Halloween (All Hallows Evening), a pale shadow of
its original
role as an exorcism of angry ghosts.’
Beans were not shunned at Roman feasts, however. Here’s a
recipe from a manuscript attributed to Apicus, that must be worth
looking into.
Peas
or Fava Beans Vitellius
Cook peas and mash. Crush pepper, lovage, ginger and over
the condiments hard boiled egg yolks, three ounces of
honey, garum, wine and vinegar. All
this put into a pot and with the crushed condiments, add
in oil and boil. Season the peas and mash so they are smooth,
add honey and serve.
Regular
readers will know that I feel uncomfortable without
a tin of baked beans near me, but even I am guilty of a certain
prejudice about
dried
beans. When I contemplated their history, I thought: But
beans are dull.What I really thought was: Beans aren’t
clever, or glamorous.What’s special about beans?
They’re peasant food. Cheap food.What you eat when you’re
desperate.
It turns out that, at least in this country, there is an
enduring ‘class’ prejudice
attached to beans – they
are associated with poverty, and there are good reasons for this. Beans
are cheap and easy to grow, and in times of famine, dried beans may
be all
that remains to eat. In pre-industrial times, the wealthy
ate meat; only the impoverished had to eat beans. Eating beans
was an unmistakable badge of social inferiority.
Food historians sometimes call the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries the ‘Golden Age of Meat’. After the plague swept through
Europe, so many people died that, initially, business and agriculture
were thrown into confusion.There was plenty of land available, but nobody
to work it. Survivors had often inherited land and money from
less fortunate relatives. Even ‘average’ people
could afford to eat meat. The interesting outcome was not that beans
remained scorned as peasant food, but that, because
nobody ‘had’ to live on them, the stigma
attached to beans began to fade away. There was no longer much chance
that you might be mistaken for a peasant because you ate a few
beans.
The discovery of the ‘New World’ saw the beginning of a great
movement of beans around the world. Once, each region had its own speciality.
Now, beans were on the move! Easy to transport (and a boon
to sailors on long voyages), all sorts of beans found their
way back to Europe, where they were, for the most part, quickly
assimilated into the everyday diet. Potatoes and tomatoes were
strange new things to the Europeans – but
they already knew what to do with beans.
But as Europe prospered, the population grew and there was
pressure to produce more food. More animals were needed to
help work the land,
and
they had to be fed. Crop rotation helped to maximise harvests
and beans made a useful contribution to the process,
helping revitalise the soil. But beans once again came
to be viewed as fit only for cattle feed. By the end of the
eighteenth century, dried fava beans were known as Horse
Beans. Fresh fava beans, still in their pods, in contrast,
were quite
fit for the table, and known as Windsor beans. Cookbooks
stopped even mentioning dried beans for two centuries.
In the 1800s, beans were popular fare for American pioneers,
miners, cowboys and soldiers. Amongst the educated classes,
there was some
interest in
beans as part of a frugal diet designed to
help people escape the dangers of modern life. In a valiant
attempt to escape modern civilisation,Thoreau took to the
wilderness
and, during his first year, sowed some seven miles of bean
rows. Sadly, he couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm
for eating his harvest, and found that the beans he grew were not worth
much to sell or barter with.Why he chose to grow them at all
isn’t entirely clear: he wrote “Why should
I raise them? Only Heaven knows.”To Thoreau, beans seemed
to represent something more than food – a closer connection
to the earth and the elements. He didn’t grow beans in
his second year at Walden Pond.
Meanwhile, working-class Brits, crammed into filthy slums to
service the mills and factories, spent their pennies on bread,
sugar, tea and potatoes.A new breed of cookery books
for the working classes
tried to rehabilitate beans as a cheap way to feed a family.
But Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management,
first published in 1861 and aimed at the middleclass female,
contains nothing about dried beans. It was the introduction
of ready-cooked bottled,
then canned, beans that made them popular again.
Heinz marketed their baked beans aggressively
in Britain from the 1880s, establishing their first
factory in Peckham in 1905. The new age of bean eating had
arrived. But there’s still no getting away
from the working class associations of beans.
‘
There is also a British tradition of the “bean feast”: a
celebration thrown by bosses for their workers.… The bean feast
did become a kind of working-class holiday spree or “beano” in
which raucous behaviour and heavy drinking turned everything briefly
upside
down.This
is probably why the popular British comic strip was called The Beano – it
had a decidedly working-class appeal, with the villains usually upper-class
twits and snobs.’
In America especially, there was another broad sector of
the
population for whom beans remained a staple: the immigrants.
In the early years of the twentieth century, until quotas
were established
in the
1930s, an influx of willing workers from all over the world
brought favourite dishes with them – pasta e fagioli
from Italy, pea soup from Scandinavia, bean soups from Eastern Europe.
Their children were anxious to adopt American ways and to become
assimilated into American society, but future generations came
to regard the old bean dishes as a valuable part of
their culture, a taste of home.
More recently, some militant campaigners amongst the black
community argued that black-eyed peas were ‘slave food’ and should
be abandoned. Quite the reverse happened:
‘ The black power movement began to valorize traditional cooking and African-American
culture. Especially among those who could afford to eat otherwise, this new
Soul Food was a reassertion of a once denigrated
cuisine as something authentic and binding for the community.’
What of the future? Albala predicts the rise of the designer
bean, and points out that there is already a resurgent interest
in ‘heirloom’ varieties,
partly tied in with the Slow Food movement which seeks to reawaken interest
in old-fashioned, slow ways of cooking.With
their peasant-style credentials and extended cooking
time, beans fit the bill well. For those less enthusiastic about
soaking and boiling, dried beans could become a thing of the past,
replaced by tinned varieties. Beans may become more
valued as a biofuel crop, or once again sink to the status of cattle
feed if the world demands more and more meat. Albala’s
postscript is thought-provoking: ‘ If our current
meat-eating regime somehow collapses or we witness sudden unprecedented
population growth, I do hope we remember beans.’
Beans: A History, by Ken Albala, yielded all the information for
this article and I wholeheartedly recommend it (although it
is not entirely vegetarian and does contain historic nonvegetarian
recipes!). It was published in September 2007 by Berg Publishers,
the ISBN is 978 1 84520 430 3 and the RRP is £14.99.
www.bergpublishers.com
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