August is a prime time for picking fresh beans. Photo by Jill Swenson.
by Jill Swenson
BEAN SEASON IN UPSTATE NEW YORK STARTS IN JULY and may extend into September or even October with a fall planting; Blue Lake 274 bush green bean seeds are the standard for most home and commercial bean growers. With a white flower, the bush blooms repeatedly through the summer season. For every blossom, a tender green bean appears. There’s another popular bean with a purple blossom: the yellow bean.
Please, don’t call them “wax” beans. Tinned, starchy beans of a ghostly hue only deserve this label when you find them on your grocer’s shelf of canned veggies. Ick.
Local, fresh from the field yellow beans are never waxy. In fact, most blind taste tests reveal no significant difference. I first took that taste test as a child when I asked the expert in my 5-year-old universe, Joe Reeves, what’s the difference between a green and a yellow bean? Joe had a farm stand along the Mississippi River in the north Minneapolis neighborhood of Camden. Dad and I would pick up fresh produce every Saturday morning. Old man Reeves liked to tease me about knowing my vegetables. The sweet corn he’d sell next week was growing tall up in Anoka, Minnesota, north of the Twin Cities. I learned to eat seasonally as a child because it was considered normal, practical, economical and just plain common sense. Joe Reeves taught me there is no real difference in bean taste between yellow and green; the difference is the color.
I’d done Dilly Beans since I spent summers as a child with my Aunt Audrey and Uncle Al on their farmstead in Warroad, Minnesota, on Lakes of the Woods. It wasn’t until I lived for years here in the Finger Lakes growing the old-timey vegetables I loved from childhood that I discovered new recipes for beans. I learned to drizzle herb-infused olive oil and sprinkle crushed garlic over steamed beans. Grilling beans marinated in a little rice vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil is so simple.
Creamed new potatoes and yellow beans is the one recipe I heard over and over again from family, friends and neighbors as central to local cuisine. When folks mention it, there is a visceral reaction that erupts from the stomach and emits a sound; “Mmmmmm.” This is a time-tested comfort food as popular as Cornell BBQ chicken.
A seller’s sign may say “fresh,” but that is no indication of when beans were picked or how they taste. If you buy fresh beans outside of this growing season, it means they are at least a week old, if not more, and certainly not local. You can find cheap beans from national distributors and regional warehouses sold as “fresh.” “Fresh” simply means they aren’t frozen or canned. Beans mechanically picked, trucked, and distributed by big wholesale operations cannot really compare in taste to local, seasonal beans delivered within 24 hours from farmer’s field to your plate. And beans, like most farm produce, lose nearly 50% of their nutritional value within one week from being picked.
So how do you know if the beans you are buying at the roadside stand, local grocer or farmer’s market are truly field fresh? In the first 24 hours of picking, beans have natural fuzz much like that of a peach. Any cotton t-shirt or garment you are wearing will work to test the bean for freshness. If the bean sticks to your shirt better than if you’d attached it with Velcro, then the beans are farm fresh. If it doesn’t stick to your shirt, put it back and walk away.
If beans are more than a day old, they need to go into cold storage to stop further decomposition of the sugars into starch. Field fresh beans should not really ‘snap.’ You should be able to bend a bean almost in half before it splits with a wimpy crisp sound. No seeds inside should show bulges on the outside. Once the plant puts the energy into seed making, the beans are tough and stringy. If it doesn’t taste fresh when raw, beans will taste worse when cooked. Depression era cookbooks often include a recipe for preparing these old beans called “leather britches beans.”
Long and slender with uniformity to a pencil shape distinguishes ripe beans. If you pick the beans yourself, you know exactly how many hours fresh they are when you serve them. In the midst of the bush, you put your hand down in where you sighted the bean and feel to the end. Once you have the tail, simply pull up and the bean will pop off easily from its stem.
Each bean comes with a cap when properly plucked. Looks a little like a hat; the natural seal has a string resembling the top of a beanie. You want to pull the bean from the plant with its cap intact. Just before you use the beans in your favorite recipe or want to eat them for a raw snack, bend back the tip at the string end to remove its cap.
Dig potatoes, pick beans; August is nigh.
Recipe: Creamed New Potatoes and Yellow Beans
Ingredients:
1 quart field fresh yellow beans; snap the cap ends off and rinse in cold water.
1 lb. of freshly dug and thoroughly washed new potatoes, red or white. It matters most that they are freshly dug and their skins are only paper-thin. The spuds should be small enough to fit inside the palm of your hand when you make a fist.
½ stick salted butter (no substitute for the roux)
1 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved in ¼ cup room temperature water (you can substitute1 or 2 tablespoons white flour for the cornstarch)
½ c. fresh cream [or buttermilk]
Instructions:
Put a 4 quart pan half full of water to boil.
Wash and prepare potatoes. If medium to large size, halve or quarter.
When the water is boiling, add potatoes. Boil at medium heat for 10 minutes.
While the potatoes are boiling, begin to prepare the roux (white sauce).
In a large cast iron frying pan, slowly melt the butter. Then set aside.
Keep boiling potatoes and add yellow beans to the 4 qt pan. Boil for 2 more minutes. Then turn off heat and let steam until you finish the roux.
Put the butter back on the burner on medium and add one tablespoon of the cornstarch mixture at a time and stir vigorously. Pour in the cream and blend thoroughly. Turn heat down to low and mix with a wire whisk until it begins to thicken.
Drain the potatoes and beans and add the cream sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with
optional garnishes: fresh minced green onions, garlic scapes, thyme, apple mint, or a sprig of parsley, a nasturtium blossom, or the feathery dill weed.
Recipe for Silly Dilly Beans
Nearly every refrigerator has a jar in the back filled with old dill pickle juice. Somebody done left the jar and eaten the last pickle. Mom cleaned out the fridge religiously in the sweltering July heat and humidity. I discovered her logic later in life when I wanted to crawl into my own Calvinator as I struggled to put up seasonal yummies and a filthy fridge long ignored for the weeds in the garden. The current steam bath climate had me looking in my fridge for such a jar of brine. Olive juice works too for silly dilly beans; perfect garnish to your Bloody Mary.
After a meal of green and/or yellow beans simply steamed, you may be lucky enough to have leftovers. If the beans have not already been lathered in butter and herbs (which could get rancid in this low-rent pickling process), put the naked beans in your old pickle jars with the leftover brine. Cooking the beans stopped the process of converting sugar to starch and they’re ready to pickle as is. Overnight refrigeration makes for an instant dilly bean. They’ll last until January when mom cleans out the fridge again and enjoys the last taste of field fresh beans.
Jill Swenson lives in Mecklenburg on a self-sustaining, third-generation family farm, where she sells local, hand-harvested, untreated seeds and rents eco-cabins in the summer. On Warren Pond Farm and Seed Company can be found on the web at onwarrenpondfarm.com.