Mister bean

Ken Albala, author of "Beans: A History," discusses the social and culinary impact of the humble legume.

By Tracie McMillan

Read more: Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

Sept. 11, 2007 | Every food has its fans, and with Ken Albala's new book, "Beans: A History," the humble legume may well have found its champion. Over a year spent eating beans on a daily basis, from minuscule rice beans to 4-inch whoppers called gigantes, the culinary historian put his expertise -- and his stomach -- to work, compiling a detailed family history of the world's edible beans.

But lest that seem like an avalanche of research to pour into a humble subject, Albala is quick to point out that beans are one of the few foods that appear in nearly every national cuisine, from French cassoulets to Filipino bean and fruit desserts. Pairing a foodie's curiosity with an academic's knack for detail, Albala carefully charts the food's historical arc while also offering recipes in keeping with each era. A simple lentil soup punctuates the tale of the small legume's role in stabilizing early agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, while tepary beans, native to North America's indigenous cultures, show up both in both a hearty stew and haute "slow food" dishes.

Still, Albala's work is at its best when he dissects the social cues tied up in beans, particularly our tendency to use beans as a metaphor for simpler times and leaner wallets. As a case in point, he contrasts Bill Clinton's biography -- which details the former president's love of beans, suggesting humble beginnings to his affluent readers -- with an early Clinton campaign jingle aimed at the poor, which dismissed beans in favor of steak.

Salon caught up with Albala at his University of the Pacific office to talk about bean myths, whether to soak or not and why gourmands may be the biggest booster for the lowly legume.

Why do beans matter?

There are very few foods that serve as a unit of analysis across cultures that you can pick up everywhere, but beans are one of those things. Every culture on earth has a staple grain; there's rice in Asia, wheat and barley in Europe and corn in the American, but beans go next to them all -- they're sort of a universal accompaniment to the grain staple.

Beans are also interesting as a social marker: Almost every culture has some sort of idea about what beans "mean." In cultures where meat is an important part of the diet, beans are the first thing to go when fortunes improve, so beans become a marker of poverty there and low classes. It is like a unit of social analysis.

I couldn't keep track of all the beans you wrote about, but it seems safe to say it's in the three-figures range. How did you find them all?

Cookbooks don't focus much on beans, so I mostly used agricultural reference works. In the 1970s, there were a lot of books published about introducing new bean species and agricultural techniques to developing nations.

What surprised me is that the beans we eat [in the U.S.] are almost all the exact same species. Black beans and kidney beans and pinto beans and Christmas beans -- those are all the same species, and they're just bred to be different colors and sizes. And, of course, the colors disappear when you cook them. People look at them in packages and think, "Oh, isn't this beautiful," but [the bean] turns brown when you cook it.

There are all sorts of beans that are really easy to grow and that are high in protein and low in fat that just have not been discovered. Some people are thinking about growing them, but Americans aren't bean eaters, really. There are so many species that you don't see in North America unless you look really, really hard.

Where did you get the recipes you include in the book?

The recipes are mostly all mine, but based on research. My favorite, I'd have to say, is the cassoulet -- it's the longest and most complicated, but if you have the right ingredients, it's amazing. There's confit duck legs and sausages, and [the dish] gets brown and crusty and beautiful. I never did get to Toulouse [France] for this book, but someday I will taste a real cassoulet.

In doing my research, I found it fascinating that in different cultures, beans are cooked in completely and utterly different ways. In the Philippines, they're sweet and put on ice cream. And you find sweet bean paste in Japan, in cakes or frozen as bean pops -- which are totally bizarre but great. In Africa, they're ground up and fried into little cakes. In the U.S., we just think "Beans: You soak them and you cook them," but they work with almost any flavor. You can pickle them, which makes them sour. You can salt them -- like the salted black beans fried with soy or sweetened that you find in Chinese cuisine. Not many foods hold up to as many variations as that.

Next page: "One kind I still don't care much for is lima beans"