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An Old Testament Swindle,
A Pythagorean Dilemma, Siege Stew,
Boston’s Sunday Dinner,
A Soupçon of Cyanide,
and A Pressing Social Problem
I was determined to know beans.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
In the late nineteenth century, an enterprising American distributor marketed his green beans as “the Ninth Wonder of the World.” It’s not certain how this appealing slogan affected the case-hardened American consumer, but it did catch the jealous eye of P. T. Barnum, who claimed that he had coined the term himself to describe such phenomena as General Tom Thumb, the Feejee Mermaid, Jumbo the Elephant, and Chang and Eng, the Siamese Twins. Barnum sued and beat the bean, which subsequently qualified its Wonder status by adding a cautious “of Food” in smaller print.
The wondrous bean that figured in this legal brouhaha was Phaseolus vulgaris, the so-called American, French, kidney, or common green bean. P. vulgaris has been cultivated for thousands of years, perhaps originally domesticated from a wild ancestor resembling the uncivilized-sounding P. aborigineus, native to Argentina and Brazil. Bean seeds from archaeological sites in Peru and Mexico have been radiocarbon-dated respectively to 8000 and 5000 BCE, and by the time of the Spanish conquest, Montezuma was taking in 5,000 tons of beans a year in tribute from his devoted subjects.
Columbus noticed the American beans (“very different from those of Spain”) in Cuba on his first voyage to the New World. Giovanni da Verrazano, flushed with success after his North American voyage of 1524, described the Indian beans as “of good and pleasant taste;” Samuel de Champlain, in his 1605 account of the Indians of the Kennebec region in Maine, mentioned their cultivation of “Brazilian beans” in different colors, three or four of which were planted in each hill of corn to grow up the supporting cornstalk. Thomas Hariot mentioned beans (in two sizes) grown by the Indians on Roanoke Island, and John Smith and Powhatan went on record as sharing a macho meal of beans and brandy in the early days of the settlement at Jamestown.
Beans, for the Indians of eastern North America, were relatively new. According to Bruce D. Smith, archaeobiologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Eastern woodlands tribes had established themselves as farmers by 2000 BCE, and had domesticated a handful of promising local plants, among them squash (crooknecks and pattypans), sunflowers, lamb’s-quarters (Chenopodium berlandieri), and marsh elder (Iva annua).
Of the traditional “three sisters” — squash, corn, and beans, which, as every schoolchild knows, were the principal crops of the American Indians — squash, in the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, was for some two millennia an only child. Beans and corn were laggardly imports from Mexico, slowly moving their way from vegetable patch to vegetable patch across the country and up the Eastern seaboard. Corn is believed to have made it to the eastern United States by 200 CE; beans arrived somewhat later. In both cases, it was another 600 years or more before cultivation really took off. If Leif Erikson, scudding along the North American coast in year 1000, had looked farther south or farther inland, he might have found farmers growing squash. He might not yet have found beans.
It seems to have been the Spanish who brought the American bean to Europe, sometime in the sixteenth century, where it was grown as an ornamental — which isn’t surprising. Bean flowers are gorgeous, described in the botanical literature as “papilionaceous,” because their petals look like butterfly wings. One story claims that the introduction of the American bean to European cuisine was sheer serendipity: at some point, a bunch of neglected pods accidentally toppled from an ornamental vine into a peculiarly placed soup pot, where they remained long enough to be cooked and eaten. This seems unlikely, since the American beans — though admittedly a little funny-looking to the novice — were readily recognizable as beans, and the Old World was used to beans. It had been living with beans for ten thousand years.
Beans are legumes, members of the family Fabaceae — the third largest of the families of flowering plants (after the Orchid and Daisy families), and the second most important to the human diet after Poaceae, the grasses. Fabaceae contains more than 600 genera and nearly 19,000 species, an unwieldy batch of friends and relations that includes beans, peas, lentils, and soybeans, carob and tamarind trees, and alfalfa, kudzu, licorice, jicama, and peanuts.
Gardenwise, the oldest of the bunch may be the lentil (Lens culinaris), whose name comes from the contact-lens-like shape of the dried bean. Lentils, along with barley and einkorn wheat, were among the first plants domesticated some 10,000 years ago in western Asia’s lush Fertile Crescent, a vaguely boomerang-shaped swath of territory between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf.
Lentils, along with barley and einkorn wheat, were among the first plants domesticated some 10,000 years ago in western Asia’s lush Fertile Crescent.
The Sumerians grew them, and the oldest known legume recipe — found in a trio of Babylonian culinary cuneiform tablets dated to 1700–1600 BCE — is for a porridge of lentils, simmered in beer. Remains of lentil dinners have been found in Bronze Age Swiss lake dwellings, and lentils are featured in the most egregious example of shysterism in the Old Testament, when the cagey Jacob talks his older twin brother Esau into trading his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup.
Almost as old is the Old World’s only cultivated bean, the fava or broad bean (Vicia faba), to which Pliny the Elder awarded “the highest place of honor” among leguminous plants. Domesticated in the late Neolithic period, the fava probably originated somewhere in the Mediterranean region or Near East, though its wild progenitor is apparently now extinct. Favas have been found in Egyptian tombs and in the ruins of Troy, and in the Old Testament, Ezekiel ate them between prophecies. The Greeks used fava beans as voting tokens in magisterial elections, a custom later remarked upon by Plutarch, who claimed that the proverbial dictum “Abstain from beans” had nothing to do with diet, but meant keep out of politics.
Among the rules adhered to by the vegetarian followers of Pythagoras, whose quasireligious sect settled in Croton on the coast of southern Italy by 530 BCE, were strictures that forbade stirring fires with iron pokers or eating meat, fish, or beans. The bean ban is usually attributed to the Pythagoreans’ belief in the transmigration of souls, in which human beings could not only be reborn as animals, but — just possibly — as beans. Certainly it wasn’t worth taking the chance: eating a bean, according to Pythagoras, was like biting off the head of one’s mother.
Alternatively the Pythagorean avoidance of beans may have had its roots in the genetic disease known as favism. Particularly common in individuals of Mediterranean ancestry, favism results from a deficiency in the enzyme glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD). The deficiency, carried on the X chromosome, renders the red blood cells of unlucky males and homozygous females sensitive to hemolysis (breakdown) by the oxidants found in fava beans. Fava bean consumption, or even a stroll through the field when the bean plants are in flower, brings on a severe allergic-type reaction, and in extreme cases rapid hemolytic anemia, shock, and death. Beans, in other words, may have made Pythagoras so sick that he simply didn’t want them anywhere near him.
Political meddling — Plutarch’s forbidden indulgence in beans — eventually led to Pythagoras’s downfall. The unpopular Pythagoreans were shunned, persecuted, and eventually driven from Croton. One story holds that beans ultimately brought about Pythagoras’s death. Trapped while on the run, he refused the only available means of escape, which involved trampling through a bean field, and so was captured and killed by his enemies.
Despite this awful warning, Pythagoras’s banned bean was a prime edible of the Middle Ages. Italian scholar and author Umberto Eco, in fact, hypothesizes that Europeans emerged from the so-called Dark Ages — the bleak and impoverished period extending from the fall of Rome to the end of the first millennium — because of the fava bean. His essay, “How the Bean Saved Civilization,” appeared in a special issue of the New York Times Magazine on the theme of the best inventions of the past one thousand years.
The evidence for the redemptive role of the bean comes from babies. Though numerical estimates vary, it’s clear that a population boom began as Europe entered the tenth century. In the seventh century — possibly the nadir of the miserable Dark Ages — the population of Europe had sunk to a hungry and disease-ridden 14 million. By the year 1000, however, it had more than doubled; by the fourteenth century, it had doubled — even tripled — again. Eco argues that the upswing in population size, energy, intellect, and the economy all derived from a new crop. It was in the tenth century that Europeans began the widespread cultivation of beans.
Legume comes from the Latin verb legere, meaning “to gather,” and when it comes to gathering, legumes — such as beans and peas — are well worth the effort. Nicknamed “the poor man’s meat,” beans and peas contain 17 to 25 percent protein, two to three times that found in cereal crops. The influx of protein into the previously parsimonious Dark Age diet made for stronger, healthier people, who lived longer and had more children. The quality of daily life improved, countries grew richer, and the expanding and better-fed population was able to support the specialization of labor, the growth of cities, the burgeoning of the arts, the emergence of science, and the launching of ships to the New World.
Furthermore, the benefits of beans lie not just in beans as food, but in the baggage the growing bean brings with it.
Leguminous plants are distinguished by their ability to fix nitrogen — that is, to convert atmospheric nitrogen to a form in which it can be used by plants and animals to synthesize such life-essential molecules as DNA, RNA, and proteins. (See box.)
Medieval beans were such an essential article of diet that the penalty for robbing a beanfield was death. In England, ghosts were said to fear broad beans — to banish specters, one spat beans at them — and those same beans, roasted, were believed efficacious in the treatment of toothache and smallpox.
“Three blue beans in a blue bladder” was a tongue twister long before she sold seashells by the seashore, and the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk — though nobody knows exactly where it came from — is of ancient origin.
Anthropologist Solomon H. Katz points out that, despite their obvious benefits, people historically have been ambivalent about beans, viewing them with “mingled respect and dread.” Beans could give you nightmares. Lunacy was said to be on the rise when the beans were in blossom, and anyone silly enough to fall asleep in a beanfield could wake up irrevocably insane. Seventeenth-century cleric John White, of whom not much seems to be known except that he was once tossed out of his post as vicar of Cherton, wrote in Art’s Treasury: Or, a Profitable and Pleasing Invitation to the Lovers of Ingenuity (1688) that if a pregnant woman indulged in “Onions, or Beans, or such vaporous Food,” her offspring would be “Lunatic, or Foolish.”
Sixteenth-century physician Baldassare Pisanelli claimed that beans “make the senses stupid, and cause dreams full of travails and perturbations.” It’s possible that Saint Jerome thought the same: he declared beans aphrodisiacs (“they tickle the genitals”) and forbade nuns to eat them.
Modern pharmacologists believe they may have found the biochemical explanation for beans’ restless and mentally unbalanced reputation. Fava beans contain up to 0.5 percent by weight L-dopa (1-3.4-dihydroxyphenylalanine), a novel amino acid first isolated from bean seedlings by Marcus Guggenheim in 1913. L-dopa was initially thought to be a mere chemical curiosity, until research in the 1950s showed it to be a precursor of dopamine, an essential neurotransmitter.
Beans, Peas, and Nitrogen
Chemically, nitrogen fixation is a heroic feat. Nitrogen, which makes up about 70 percent of the air we breathe, ordinarily exists in the form of molecular N2 — two atoms of nitrogen held together by a powerful triple bond, the chemical equivalent of Gorilla Glue. Practically nothing unhinges N2. In its triple-bonded form, it is stubbornly unreactive, which means that it simply sits there sullenly and can’t be used to make anything else. If nitrogen were a food, it would be a coconut — delicious, nutritious, and maddeningly uncrackable. Eighteenth-century French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, who first named nitrogen, originally called it “azote,” which means lifeless. In the atmosphere, the only thing that rips apart that triple bond is a bolt of lightning.
In the garden, however, this feat is performed by beans, peas, and their leguminous relatives. Strictly speaking, legumes don’t fix nitrogen themselves; rather, they serve as cooperative incubators for organisms that do. Legumes nurture symbiotic Rhizobia bacteria in nodules on their roots, which — by virtue of an enzyme called nitrogenase — are able to convert unusable atmospheric nitrogen (N2) into usable ammonia (NH3). Plants without such bacterial buddies require another nitrogen source, which in the case of modern commercial crops is often provided by expensive and environmentally damaging chemical fertilizers.
A time-honored alternative to these unnatural additives is crop rotation. Since Roman times, farmers have periodically planted their fields with Rhizobia-toting legumes to add fixed nitrogen to the soil.
Dopamine, if present in abnormal quantities in the human brain, can have disastrous effects. Too much appears to be a corollary of schizophrenia; too little is the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease, the debilitating ailment first described by physician James Parkinson in 1817 as “the shaking palsy.” Dopamine cannot cross the blood-brain barrier — that is, injected into the human body, it can’t get into the brain — but L-dopa, a more agile molecule, can. Today L-dopa is the drug of choice for alleviating the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, for which discovery Swedish scientist Arvid Carlsson won a Nobel Prize.
It seems likely that L-dopa may account for the classical reports of sleep disturbances, vivid dreaming, and enhanced sexuality associated with fava bean eating. Today most L-dopa is obtained not from favas, but from the even more L-dopa-heavy velvet bean (Mucuna pruriens), so named for its fuzzy golden pods. A native of India, the velvet bean, a pharmacological powerhouse, contains up to 7 percent L-dopa.
Pliny the Elder, annoyingly, does not prescribe beans for palsy, which makes some medical sense, but instead recommends white bread and baths. He does, however, list sixteen other bean-based remedies: beans parched in vinegar are good for “gripings of the bowels;” beans boiled with garlic are good for coughs; and even the ashes of beanstalks are useful for soothing sciatica.
Most Romans ate beans, in one form or another. The first-century cookbook Apicius (De Re Coquinaria) — possibly written by the flamboyant gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, known for throwing lush parties during the reign of Tiberius — devoted an entire section to legumes, with recipes for mushes, porridges, soups, gruels, and bean-stuffed suckling pigs. Among these, and less awful than most Roman concoctions, is Lenticulum de castaneis, a dish of mashed lentils and chestnuts with spices and olive oil, which sounds vaguely like hummus. My favorite, however, is Apicius’s beans “Boiled, Sumptuously,” in which the boiled beans are served as a salad with hard-boiled eggs, fennel, pepper, and a little wine and salt. Or, the author adds generously, serve them up “in simpler ways as you may see fit.”
Beans, to the ancients, were primarily cheap peasant food, the classical equivalent of Wonder bread and Hamburger Helper. Martial, the first-century Roman poet best known for his twelve catchy (and occasionally obscene) books of epigrams, describes inviting a friend to dinner, with the caveat that, as a poet, he’s too broke to provide luxuries and flute girls. All he can spring for is leeks, boiled eggs, cabbage, and beans — to accompany “a kid snatched from the jaws of a savage wolf,” which sounds suspiciously like the first-century equivalent of roadkill.
The fourteenth-century Forme of Cury (Manner of Cookery), compiled by the cooks of England’s Richard II — the book to consult if you need to gild a peacock — includes recipes “For to make grounden benes,” “For to make drawen benes,” and “Benes yfryed,” which, in Gothic script, looks pretty much like refried beans. Similarly, Le Menagier de Paris, written in 1393 by a helpful husband for his inexperienced teenage bride, includes — along with instructions for eradicating flies (whack them with paddles), choosing a fresh rabbit (snap its back legbone), and cleaning birdlime off a sparrowhawk (dunk its feathers in milk) — detailed instructions for cooking beans and preventing them from sticking to the bottom of the pot.
Beans, to the ancients, were primarily cheap peasant food, the classical equivalent of Wonder bread and Hamburger Helper.
Johannes Bockenheim — cook to Pope Martin V and author, sometime in the 1430s, of Registrum coquine (The Cookery Register) — explains not only how to prepare a dish, but also what sorts of persons each of his seventy-four recipes is intended to serve: peasants or princes, Italians or Englishmen, priests or prostitutes. His bean soup, a mix of stewed favas, onions, olive oil, and saffron, is recommended for Lollards and pilgrims — that is, for both heretics and the ultradevout — which seems emblematic of the comfortable ubiquity of the bean.
Almost every culture has its signature bean cuisine. In France, the most famous of bean dishes is cassoulet, a stew of fava beans, meat, and spices, named for the flat earthenware dish or cassole in which it is traditionally baked. The story goes that the original cassoulet was invented during the siege of the town of Castelnaudary during the Hundred Years’ War. In 1355, with England’s Edward, the Black Prince, at their gates, the inhabitants of Castelnaudary decided to fortify themselves for battle with stew. Everything they had, including beans, duck, goose, and pork sausage, went into the communal pot. The nicer version of the story holds that the well-fed French then rose up and beat off their English enemies, though history reports that the Black Prince sacked the town, burned most of it, and massacred the populace. The cassoulet tradition, however, survived, and today, according to food writer Alexander Lobrano, Castelnaudary is the heart of southwestern France’s “cassoulet belt,” an 80-mile stretch of bean cookery where every restaurant serves some version of cassoulet.
By the seventeenth century, cassoulet was no longer made solely with fava beans, but with Phaseolus vulgaris, the exciting new bean from the recently discovered Americas. American beans reputedly came to France with the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici, when she arrived from Italy in 1533 to marry the future Henri II. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat’s History of Food (2009) describes how Catherine brought a humble little bag of beans in her trousseau, tucked in among her laces, ropes of pearls, gold-embroidered gowns, and black-and-crimson silk sheets. (Catherine also gets credit for introducing the French to forks, sorbet, olive oil, Chianti, macaroons, artichokes, and the ballet.)
The American bean was known in France as the haricot, even though, according to Toussaint-Samat, the original haricot or hericoq had nothing to do with beans. Instead the word referred to an entirely beanless turnip-and-mutton stew, popular in France since at least the fourteenth century. Following the introduction of Phaseolus vulgaris, however, the American beans ousted turnips from the traditional dish, and in fact became so overwhelmingly popular as an haricot ingredient that the bean subsequently grabbed the name for itself. (An alternative source suggests that haricot comes from the Aztec word for bean, ayacotl.) To distinguish the haricot dried (the edible bean seed) from the haricot fresh (the young bean, pod and all), precise cooks further adopted the term haricot vert (“green bean”).
Kidneys and Canoes
While the scientific name Phaseolus derives from the Greek for “little boat” (supposedly from the canoelike shape of the seedpods), the common name kidney bean comes from the anatomically suggestive shape of the seeds. Medically, this was thought significant: the medieval Doctrine of Signatures held that the shapes of plants constituted a broad hint from the Almighty as to their uses in healing.
The Doctrine maintained, for example, that walnut kernels, being crinkly and convoluted, had “the very figure of the Brain,” and thus were good for headaches; lungwort, whose attractively speckled leaves reminded some depressed observer of diseased lungs, was a specific for pulmonary infections; and the kidney bean was a cure for urinary disorders. Physician Nicholas Culpeper, in his Complete Herbal (1653), recommended beans, dried, ground to a powder, and dissolved in white wine, as a treatment for kidney stones.
A charming story holds that the haricot vert and its associated recipes reached England in company with fleeing French Huguenots during the reign of Elizabeth I. In gratitude for religious freedom, they made a gift of green beans to the Queen, who found them “much engaging to the royal taste” and ordered some planted in her garden at Hampton Court. A brief movement then flared up among patriotic British farmers to rename the new and presumably French vegetable the “Elizabeth bean.”
Unfortunately, like the tale of the bag of beans tucked in Catherine de Medici’s lush luggage, there’s little (if any) supporting historical evidence for this – and frankly, the bean plug doesn’t sound like Elizabeth I, whose food passions were candy and cake. Still, American beans were both grown and eaten in Elizabeth’s England, if not enthusiastically by the Queen.
John Gerard includes the Phaseolus or “Kidney Beane” in his encyclopedic 1597 Great Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, in which he finds it vastly superior to the familiar fava or “great garden Beane.” Boiled, buttered, and eaten in the pod, he writes, the American beans are “exceeding delicate meate and do not ingender winde as other Pulses do.” Ripe, however, “they are neither toothsome nor wholsome,” and thus should all be picked “whilest they are yet greene and tender.”
American bean cookery owes a lot to the Indians who, by the time the European colonists arrived, had been cooking and eating beans for at least 600 years. The original of Boston baked beans was a New England Indian dish in which dried beans were soaked in water until softened, mixed with bear fat and maple sugar, and baked overnight in a “beanhole” — a hole dug in the earth and lined with hot stones.
Slow overnight baking particularly appealed to the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, for whom cooking was prohibited on the Sabbath. Beans, tossed into the pot on Saturday night, seemed a neat solution to the problem of Sunday dinner, and soon became a Boston tradition. Boston, accordingly, acquired the nickname Beantown — though somewhat unfairly, since the top baked-bean eaters in the world are the British, who consume 800 million tons of them a year, a lot of them for breakfast.
By the eighteenth century, the “Indian Beans” had acquired varietal names. Thomas Jefferson grew twenty-seven varieties of kidney beans at Monticello, including Arikara or “Ricara” beans, collected by Lewis and Clark from the Dakota Arikara tribe during their 1804–1806 cross-country Voyage of Discovery.
In the first published American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery — in which the longest recipe is a three-page account of how to dress a turtle — the author lists nine varieties of beans, among them the Clabboard, the Crambury, the Lazy, and the English or horse bean, this last so easily cultivated that it “may be raised by boys.” Not much is known about Amelia Simmons, not even where she came from, but best guess places her in either Connecticut or New York. She describes herself as “a poor solitary orphan,” and admits modestly to being “circumscribed in knowledge,” for which in her preface she solicits the “Candor of the American Ladies.” (She received it, apparently, since subsequent printings of American Cookery include corrections to her original recipes.) The recipes indicate that vegetables are not Amelia’s strong suit: in fact, she lists only two for beans, one for French (American or green) beans and one for broad (fava) beans. Instructions are the same for both: boil them.
Amelia does differentiate among string, shell, and dried beans, the three uses to which the edible bean is still put today. The string bean — stringless since 1894, when Calvin Keeney of New York bred a bean free of the fibrous “string” that ordinarily runs the length of the pod — is eaten whole, green and immature, while the outer pod is still tender. At this stage the beans are also called snaps because they crack crisply when broken in two. Not all are actually green: the wax or golden-podded bean was introduced in the 1830s, developed by sequentially selecting for lightened pod color.
Most colonial string beans were pole types or “runner” beans, often planted in the cornfield Indian-style, so as to clamber up the cornstalks. Bush string beans were also apparently cultivated by the North American Indians: the Omahas, for example, raised “walking beans” (pole types, which climbed or crawled) and “beans-not-walking” (bush varieties, which stayed put). Still, bush beans were rare in gardens before the nineteenth century, when New York seedsman Grant Thorburn offered one of the first named bush varieties in his catalog in 1822. It was called Refugee, since it was (supposedly) among the beans brought to England by the refuge-seeking Huguenots in the 1500s.
Somewhat older adolescent beans are eaten as “shell” beans. By the shell stage, nine to eleven weeks after planting, the bean pods have become inedibly rubbery, but the enclosed seeds are still tender and immature, prime candidates for the cooking pot. The bean generally reaches adulthood (the dry-bean stage) after twelve to fourteen frost-free weeks on the vine. Designated “best for winter use” by Miss Simmons, these include such traditional baking beans as the small white oval-shaped bean so commonly found in ships’ stores that it is best known today as the navy bean.
While Phaseolus vulgaris is by far the dominant species of the cultivated American beans — worldwide, we produce some 25 million tons of it each year — it’s not the only bean on the Phaseolus family bush. Also grown today are P. lunatus, the lima bean; P. coccineus, the scarlet runner bean; and P. acutifolius, the tepary bean.
I’ll admit, right up front, that I’m not a fan of lima beans. Everyone else in my family loves them, so clearly it’s my fault and has nothing to do with the beans. Lima beans have “a wonderful plush texture,” writes Martha Rose Shulman in the New York Times; and Laurie Colwin in More Home Cooking (1995) admits to being addicted to them. “They are pillowy, velvety, and delicious,” Colwin writes, “and people should stop saying mean things about them.” But I just can’t see it, and in my lima-bean blindness, I’m not alone. Bart Simpson hates lima beans; and in Judith Viorst’s picture book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (2009) — in which life is so awful that Alexander is prepared to throw in the towel and move to Australia — one of the bad-day disasters is lima beans for dinner.
The species Phaseolus lunatus includes both large-seeded limas and small-seeded sieva or butter beans. The species name (lunatus) comes from the moon-like shape of the moon-colored seeds; the common name (lima) is from their city of approximate origin in Peru, where archaeologists estimate they were under cultivation 6,000 years ago. The domesticated lima bean thus considerably pre-dates Lima, founded in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro in the valley of the river known to generations of Peruvian natives as the Rimac. (The lima thus might better be known as the Rimac bean.) The Spaniards, who liked them, sent samples of the local beans back to Europe, and then distributed them, as a sideline of their numerous voyages of exploration, to the Philippines, Asia, Brazil, and Africa.
“They [lima beans] are pillowy, velvety, and delicious, and people should stop saying mean things about them.”
Lima beans reached the United States in the early nineteenth century, by one account picked up in Peru by naval officer John Harris, who first grew them in his garden in Chester, New York. If so, they caught on like wildfire. Lima beans are mentioned in the 1812 diary of Benjamin Goddard, a gardening resident of Brookline, Massachusetts; and a recipe for “Lima, or sugar beans” appears in Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife of 1824. Chances are there were multiple introductions: the varieties grown today can be traced back to a range of original South American imports.
Most eaters, unlike Bart, Alexander, and me, find them scrumptious. Eliza Leslie, in her Directions for Cookery, In Its Various Branches (1840), declares limas “the finest of all the beans.” Frances Trollope, a visiting English author who loathed everything on the continent, including the American view of Niagara Falls, declared lima beans “a most delicious vegetable: could it be naturalized with us it would be a valuable acquisition.”
Hands-down most spectacular of the cultivated American beans is the scarlet runner, P. coccineus, which was first domesticated in Central America and Mexico. Nicknamed “painted lady” for its gorgeous and gaudy flowers, the scarlet runner was first adopted by Europeans as an ornamental. It was grown in sixteenth-century England as “garden smilax,” so called because, as it climbs, it twines counterclockwise like smilax or honeysuckle. John Gerard grew it in his garden, on decoratively positioned poles, although it was equally popular over the “arbors of banqueting places” to lend a note of glorious color to the upper-class picnic. In Germany it was known as Feuerbohne or “fire bean.” Thomas Jefferson reports planting some in 1812 on the “long walk” of the garden as “Arbor beans, white, crimson, scarlet, purple.”
Gambling aside, we all know the real problem with beans.
P. acutifolius, the tepary bean, is the ancient Phaseolus of the American Southwest. The tepary is a rapid grower, notably resistant to drought, ideally suited to the hot, dry climates of western Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. It was domesticated in Mexico at least by 5000 BCE and was intensively cultivated by the Hopis, who deliberately selected for the widest possible range of colors: yellow, tawny, brown, garnet, blue-black, white, and speckled. Tepary beans, before the advent of the playing card and the poker chip, figured as counters in an ancient Indian gambling game.
Gambling aside, we all know the real problem with beans. Both Old and New World beans — and, to be fair, bran, onions, cucumbers, raisins, cauliflower, lettuce, coffee, and dark beer — have a reputation for eliciting a condition known delicately in the sixteenth century as “windinesse.” Flatulence, for much of human history, has been a pressing social concern: Robert Burton, in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, lists sixty-four proposed remedies for sufferers. The embarrassing aftereffects of bean eating are due to an assortment of oligosaccharides — short chains of two to ten linked sugars — which the body is unable to break down into metabolizable form. The bacteria of the lower intestinal tract, however, can digest these tidbits just fine, producing in the process an accumulation of bloating gas.
One possible solution to the bean problem is to nuke the beans. Jammala Machaiah and Mrinal Pednekar, researchers in the food science laboratory at the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay, India, have found that zapping beans with low-intensity gamma rays eliminates up to 80 percent of the pesky oligosaccharides. Another method — the recipient of U.S. Patent No. 6,238,725 in 2001 — involves soaking and boiling, though not in the helter-skelter manner as performed in the average kitchen, but under carefully calibrated conditions involving mathematical formulae.
While hardly the pinnacle of social acceptability, flatulence is not ordinarily dangerous — except perhaps in the case of a Roman aristocrat under the emperor Claudius who reportedly endangered his health by embarrassed retention. Other bean components can be much nastier.
Foremost among the evils are the cyanogens, harmless sugar complexes that in the presence of a specific enzyme are cloven to release cyanide, an effective and deadly inhibitor of the respiratory system. Cyanogens are found in the seeds of apples, pears, peaches, and apricots, as well as in lima and kidney beans — the last two owing their appealing flavor to a soupçon of cyanide. Wild beans are generally higher in cyanogens than are their cultivated relatives, and some cultivated varieties have more poisonous potential than others. The colored lima beans, for example, of the sort popular in early Peru, contain up to thirty times the cyanogen concentration of the all-white lima beans grown today.
Red Wine, Chocolate — and Beans
Air isn’t good for us. Breathe it long enough, points out Nick Lane, author of Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World (2002), and it inevitably does us in. Oxygen is a killer.
The culprits here are a class of sinister oxygen off shoots called free radicals — highly reactive molecules with itchy unpaired electrons. Free radicals are products of normal body metabolism — each one of our body’s cells generates 20 billion of them a day — and they’re also found floating around in the environment, constituents of air pollutants and cigarette smoke. Left to themselves, free radicals — like tiny gobbling Pac-men — destroy cellular integrity and wreak havoc with DNA.
Our bodies ordinarily fight free radicals off with a pair of antioxidant enzymes, catalase and superoxide dismutase (rudely abbreviated as SOD). Over time, however, our lifelong accumulation of free radicals overwhelms our normal defenses. Free-radical-induced damage has been implicated in cardiac disease, long-term memory loss, macular degeneration, and cancer. One theory of aging holds that it’s all the fault of free-radical-generated oxidative stress.
We can beat free radicals off, however — with food. Red wine, dark chocolate, green tea, fruits, and vegetables are all — in varying degrees — rich sources of protective antioxidants such as vitamins E and C, carotenoids, and flavonoids. The total antioxidant content of a food is determined by ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) analysis — a test-tube test that determines how effectively various foods can block the oxidative destruction of a fluorescent test molecule. In theory, the higher the ORAC score, the better, though in actual practice there are variations depending on whether a food is raw, boiled, baked, steamed, or juiced.
Top of the list, according to a 2004 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study: blueberries, artichokes, apples, potatoes, and red beans.
Along with cyanogens, bean seeds contain protease inhibitors — complex protein molecules that interfere with the enzymatic processes of digestion — and lectins, which bind to sugar receptors on the surfaces of intestinal cells, with ensuing ill effects. Black turtle beans, for example, contain a hefty dose of the toxic lectin phytohemagglutinin, which induces a lethal clotting of the blood. Luckily, both cyanogens and phytohemagglutinin are defused by cooking, which means there’s no need to fear black bean soup. Perhaps, as one anthropologist suggests, cooking developed in the first place to detoxify the otherwise irresistibly nutritious seeds of wild legumes.
Such piddling negatives as poisons, however, are hardly enough to put a dent in the popularity of beans. In comparison to the egg — the acknowledged ne plus ultra of human foods — beans pack 34 percent as much protein, and they’re a whole lot easier to carry. Daniel Defoe’s stranded Robinson Crusoe, discovering a “parcel of money” in gold and silver on his desert island, is thoroughly dismayed: “I would have given it all for a sixpenny-worth of turnip and carrot seed out of England, or for a handful of peas and beans, and a bottle of ink.”
“Not worth beans” has meant “utterly valueless” since the thirteenth century, which shows that, historically, we haven’t had a clue as to the value of beans. A lot of us are here only because of them.
Chances are, even you and me.