Big Food, Big Garden, Big Life

From Master Chef Louis P. De Gouy, The Gold Cook Book (1947)

Beans have been cultivated in the Americas since prehistoric times. Lima beans have been discovered in burial mounds in Peru, and early explorers found beans being cultivated by the Indians, from Canada to South America. In 1605, in a letter concerning the Indians in the Kennebee region, Champlain noted: “… with corn they put in each hill three or four Brazilian beans which are of different colors. When they grow up they interlace with the corn, which reaches to the height of from 5 to 6 feet; And they keep the ground very free from weeds …”

This habit of planting beans with corn was practiced by Indians everywhere and is still sometimes done. The first French explorers in Canada took beans home with them for cultivation in France; consequently beans in England were originally known as “French beans.” Captain John Smith in 1614 found beans grown by Indians in New England, and when the Pilgrims landed on November 19, 1620, Miles Standish dug up corn and “a bag of beans” from a pit.

The records of bean cultivation in ancient history all seem to refer to field beans rather than pole beans. The culture of the latter was not common until the sixteenth century. Dwarf beans are also a fairly recent mutation, and the first mention of dwarf snap beans was not until 1542.

Small seeded or Siena beans were grown in the Carolinas as early as 1700. Large seeded beans were first introduced into North America by Captain John Harris of the U.S. Navy who brought some seeds back from Lima, Peru, in 1824 and planted them on his farm at Chester, New York. These seeds from Lima were the forebears of our modern Lima bean. The botanical name Phaseolus, according to a writer in 1865, is derived from the resemblance between the shape of the pods and a special form of ship supposed to have originated at Phaselis, a town of Pamphylia.

Garbanzos or Chick-peas, are the fruit of a pea-like plant, probably the “pulse”; roundish, flattened on two sides, wrinkled when dry, and with a projection of the summit, both ripe and unripe. In Mediterranean countries it forms the basis of the Olla Podrida of Spain and Mexico and is well known and liked in California, Mexico, and Spanish-American countries generally, where it is eaten in many ways—boiled, roasted, in soups, also coated with sugar or syrup as a confection. There are a number of varieties: white, black and red, white being the best. The garbanzo is a leguminous plant of the vetch tribe. It contains over 6 per cent of fat and is the leading protein food mentioned in the above countries. In India, it is called “Gram.”

Colorado pinto is a bean as sacred to the West as the codfish to Boston. When the Spaniards first overran the country, they found the dappled pink bean a staple food of the Indians. Pinto they named it, the Spanish word meaning paint. Pinto was the bean that helped build Western railroads and clear the settlers’ land. A “stick-to-the-ribs” bean, and today we know why. In the pinto bean, nature has hidden an abundant supply of the B-1 vitamin. There are other vitamins, too, as well as important body-regulating minerals.

The soybean, called “Food of the Ancients,” and “The Little Honorable Plant,” known throughout the Orient, has a useful history dating back five millenniums. In the year 2838 B.C., Emperor Shen-Nung, father of Chinese agriculture, listed some 300 medicinal properties to be found in the soybean. Soybeans furnished orientals the proteins lacking in a diet of rice; they contain twelve times the fat of ordinary beans but have little sugar and no starch. Their protein content equals the protein of meat, eggs and milk … the finest there is. It builds tissue, restores energy, yet doesn’t put on fat.

The broad bean is one of the aristocratic vegetables of English gardens. It is one of the most ancient beans (except the soybean) of Europe, Asia and Africa, dating back to unknown periods, some say to the Bronze Age; also known as the Fava bean.