BEANS

BEANS ARE LIVING HISTORY. Behind every variety there’s a colorful, striped, and dotted story that gets passed on from gardener to gardener, cook to cook, diner to diner. Planting beans is the first momentous step. Eating them perpetuates our direct connection to their place and their past. My Gramma Anthony preserved an Italian-American tradition of eating what she called “lu-beans,” the modest lupini beans, and only on New Year’s Eve. She’d spend a week soaking the dried beans in a crock, changing the water daily, softening and plumping them to their impressive size, then seasoning them with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

My favorite part was to pop those beans out of their skins and into our mouths. When I asked John Corkendahl, head gardener of Blackberry Farm, in Walland, Tennessee, about the heirloom beans that grow well in his garden, he shared a creamy white cowpea called Whippoorwill, which dates back to 1868. You have to grow these beans to perpetuate the seeds, so I gave some of John’s Whippoorwill bean seeds to Zaid Kurdieh of Norwich Meadows Farm in central New York and asked him to grow them. It’s more important than ever to support small farmers, the Seed Savers Exchange, and heirloom varieties, because in this commercial world, it is hardly a given that they will be there tomorrow.