Beans : The Beaning of America

Anasazi, Appaloosa, Bayo, Black Turtle, Blue Goose, Calypso, European Soldier, Great Giganti, Jacob’s Cattle, Jackson Wonder, Mortgage Lifter, Painted Pony, Pinquito, Rattlesnake, Scarlet Emperor, Snowcap, Tongues of Fire, Trout. . . .

You want beans? You’ve got ‘em.

It wasn’t so long ago that the only dried beans you could find were Great Northerns, limas and kidneys. Then, with the first rush of interest in ethnic cuisines, along came black beans. And cannellini. Then favas and flageolet. Then the dam burst.

These beans are startlingly beautiful, richly colored and look more like a collection of beautifully polished semi-precious pebbles than something you’d boil with bacon.

But do they taste as good as they look? Since most of these are beans that are rarely found in stores, we bought 16 varieties and cooked them as simply as possible (water and a little salt, covered, in a 250-degree oven).

Some were quite distinctive. For example, the Chestnut bean (a strain developed by Tom Phipps) not only looks like a chestnut--a bright hard brown--but has a little of that nut’s tannic bitterness as well.

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Christmas limas are another unusual bean, with a sweet, almost bready flavor as well as a beautiful purple and cream shell that retains most of its color in cooking.

And flageolets, one of the standard beans of French cooking, have a remarkable, almost fishy taste similar to green beans.

But most of the other beans offered variations on what can only be described as a “beany” taste--earthy and somewhat nutty, delicious and at the same time as difficult to describe as the taste of a potato.

“It’s true that a lot of these beans taste somewhat similar,” says Rauch. “The way I like to explain it, though, is that you can’t tell me that a pinto bean tastes like a white bean tastes like a black bean. Within that range you have a whole spectrum of intensity of flavor, from the mildest, like Anasazi, to the other end--black beans or pintos.”

In our tasting, the mild beans included Bayo, Imperial Cranberry, cannellini, Christmas lima, Swedish, New Mexico Appaloosa, Tolosana, Garboncito and Anasazi. The “greener”-tasting beans included Madeira, Borlotti, flageolet, Red Calypso and Pueblo. Finally, there are Chestnuts and Scarlet Runners, which have a pleasant bitter edge.

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The most remarkable thing about even the mildest bean was how much flavor it had when compared to the beans with which most of us are familiar--wan, dried out and pale.

“My mail-order business probably has doubled every year for the last six years,” says Ken Rauch, who runs the Bean Bag, an Oakland store that has been selling beans since 1932.

The story is much the same at Phipps Ranch, a bean grower/mail-order house in little Pescadero, Calif.--about halfway between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. Phipps pioneered the marketing of specialty dried beans and remains one of the leaders.

“We’ve been growing and selling beans for about 12 years,” says Valerie Phipps, who, with her husband, Tom, founded the ranch in 1969. “We started out very simply and we knew nothing. The only beans we knew how to grow were fava beans and that was because the farmers Tom had worked for had grown them. Then this growers’ catalogue came from the East Coast that had all of these interesting heirloom beans. We started out getting a quarter pound of each of these and saw which ones grew well and which ones didn’t.

“Then we started collecting them from all over. We have let some go over the years, but we’ve kept the majority of what we started with and added some along the way. It’s so neat that beans are getting to be recognized as a good food. People are looking forward to having beans rather than it being just poor man’s food.”

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At $3 a pound from Phipps and only a little less at the Bean Bag, these are hardly poverty food. But many of these are beans you just won’t find anywhere else.

“The nicest thing about this business is giving people a good product, something that’s good for them, but that is also preserving the heritage of the beans themselves,” says Phipps. “A lot of these beans were forgotten about, grown only in back yards or in families but never enough to make a big market. But these are not just a novelty item. They have a history behind them. Every bean has a story.”

Phipps Ranch, P.O. Box 349, Pescadero, Calif. 94060. (415) 879-0787.

The Bean Bag, 818 Jefferson St., Oakland, Calif. 94607. (510) 839-8988.