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  “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.

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  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.

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  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,” a
n 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”).

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  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.

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  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 S
hulman 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.