I noticed this later when I was reading Jane Grigson's classic 'Vegetable Book'.
This is how a cookery book should be written - good descriptions of the ingredients including their history, storage, cultivation and cultural importance. It then tells you how to cook them and gives a few recipe ideas. In other words, it shows you how to understand your ingredients rather than simply giving you a formula to follow blindly. I could now go on to show how this could be a lesson for other areas of life, but I'm keen to discuss beans so I'll leave you all with that one to contemplate fr yourselves!
Haricot beans are confusing. It seems that there are a great many varieties for a start, each of which can be harvested and prepared in a variety of ways (picked young and whole they can be served as a green bean, a bit like the string-bean for instance). It also seems that what we call haricot beans are not the same as the beans the French give that name, but I could be wrong; like I said, it's confusing!
Like the tomato, beans have even suffered prejudice in the past. The ancients saw beans as containing the souls of the dead and the Romans ate them only at funerals. Lucien introduced a philosopher in hell by saying that he didn't know which was the greater crime; eating beans or eating your father's head! It should be noted that Lucien was a satirist so that's not meant literally. He was probably making some clever point about the whole 'beans containing human souls' thing. Yet here we are, eating beans with ne'er a care.
So, baked beans eh? Mr Heinz? Can you hear me?
Before Heinz baked and tinned beans they were used mainly be the middle and upper classes (for some reason) until Mr Heinz realised their potential and decided to put them in a can.
The recipe which inspired Heinz beans (Boston baked beans) is close to the French Cassoulet de castelnaudaray according to Ms Grigson, and she gives an example (she says it's much closer to the Boston dish than the French dish since it would be far too sweet for the French tastes) which she calls simple, but then it assumes you have a potted duck handy! It contains stuff like pork, bay, beer, mustard, molasses and candied ginger.
A tin of Heinz beans contains (from memory) beans, water, tomato, sugar, vinegar, cornstarch and 'spices'.
I didn't find any tasty looking recipes which have Heinz beans as an ingredient, which didn't surprise me: 200 years of culinary evolution and we are left with a 'dish' who's second largest ingredient is water.
Oh, and you could probably grow haricot beans in the Appellation mountains. Probably not in the forest, but the beardy man could find a clearing and grow them there.
He could probably grow a jute plant or two as well.
He's working on that axe and tells me he'll get started on it as soon as he's built his foundry.
No comments:
Post a Comment