BEAN YEAR BOX 4: Sweet bean snacks (amanatto, candied chickpeas) and Desert Beans (carob, mesquite, and tepary) launches this Friday 6/18
Welcome to BEAN YEAR Box 3
With each one of these boxes the weight of presenting, as honestly and straightforwardly as I can, each of these genus of Fabaceae grows. I don’t frankly feel qualified to be doing this. While I have a strong background in botany and ethno- or economic botany, someone could spend their whole life studying, for example, Pisum, Peas. I watch Gardener’s World and see people who have a national collection of any given plant genus in Britain. The person who has all the species of Elder, Sambucus, and varieties of each, or all the species and varieties of Dahlia or Snowdrops. There are plant breeders who work on Fava their whole lives. They know each plant, they watch the flowers, they pull the rough dried pods from the stalks. Rivers of fava have flowed through their hands. They know fava, they should tell you about fava. In this box I’m presenting the Pigeon Pea, Cajanus cajan, I was looking for a plant to highlight how the word “pea” is understood throughout the world, but our history with this bean, from the Caribbean to Africa through to India, is remarkable. With two different domestication events, it is a living connection to the slave trade and African resistance in the Caribbean. It deserves someone with more connection to the plant than I have. Fortunately for us, a defining point of this whole project: I am not an intermediary for you to build a relationship with these beans. While I curate the presentation of each genus, I am still sending you the actual beans, or if you’re just reading this on the blog, encouraging you to go source them yourself! So much of our lives are just discussions about ideas,often something we can have no impact on, and often mediated through backlight screens. I personally find it helpful to physically touch things, like our hypothetical fava expert with rivers of favas running through their hands.
Peas, Pisum sativum syn Lathyrus oleraceus
Split Green Pea and Fried Green Pea
I make mashed peas. I take a bag of frozen peas. Put a quarter cup of milk in it. A tablespoon or two of butter. A lot of black pepper. Salt. And after it’s cooked for a while, say ten minutes?,I blend it up with an immersion stick blender. The longer I’ve been making this, the more I mimic how I make mashed potatoes. I came up with this on my own, but searching for it, it seems a lot of people have done the same. It is not however “mushy peas”.
In part because classic British/ect mushy peas use a dry green pea and soak it with sodium bicarbonate and also in part because the British get surprisingly grumpy about the proper preparation of “mushy peas”. The classic dry green pea, which you have in front of you, is the color of the cotyledons, similar to the lentils in the last box. I’ve chosen green, as opposed to yellow, because, despite being bred more recently, green seems more traditional. These, like most of the lentils in the last box, come from The Palouse.
Similarly, peas chosen for being green, is what has evolved into the fried pea snack you also have. These have been a revelation for me. I have had wasabi peas many times, but these plain fried peas are so dense and delicious. Snacking beans like this are more common in Asian cuisines, these are specifically Japanese. A funny turn of history, it has been suggested a Japanese bred pea is what evolved into the English Marrowfat pea used for mushy peas.
As always I’m trying to present easy to eat beans, Fabaceae, that we can incorporate into our lives. Taking the time to make mushy peas or getting a smoked ham hock or trotter to make pea soup or pottage is good. And also, having a snack at hand on the commute home, or out with your family, or on a summer afternoon having some beverage with friends, is good. As we saw with the roasted chickpeas in the first box, and most of the items in this box, most people around the world have a tradition of snacking beans and I hope that’s something I can encourage.
Speaking of snacking peas, it would be a great error to not mention fresh green peas. From snow peas, to snap peas, to sugar peas, there’s a world of fresh eating young peas that have been selected for the young pods or peas. In particular we grow a lot of sugar peas, which are a sort of sweeter snap pea, that’s often eaten raw. I could not more highly suggest going to a farmers market and getting a pint of them to eat with some friends on a walk through the market.
Yellow Peas
Yellow cotyledon peas were more common for a long long time. Mendel used the cotyledon and pea flower color as part of his genetic experiments. Cooking-wise they are basically similar tothe green.
Grey Peas
Which brings us to the closer wild type peas. I am calling these grey peas because I like that term. There are contemporary roman accounts, a couple thousand years ago, of soldiers picking wild peas to supplement their diets. The ones I’ve had are Carlin Peas from Britain, Roveja Peas from Umbria in Italy, Grey Peas from Latvia. I’ve grown Roveja and Grey peas. I am looking for commercial sources of any of these to offer in future boxes. I have one for Roveja peas and I’m considering importing Carlin peas for future specialty boxes.
These wild-type peas are to green peas as the black chickpeas are to the big beige middle eastern chickpeas. They are dense, they keep their shape, they are very flavorful and hold up against any other flavor. If you have the opportunity to try them take it. If you have the space, consider growing them, they’re beautiful plants. Going back to Mendel and plant breeding, a lot of plants have been bred to be bigger, oftentimes less bitter or flavorful, but primarily so that they can be harvested en masse all at once and processed and cleaned mechanically. A lot of these wild types ripen at different rates and have to be hand harvested over a period of several weeks or a month. So industrial farming is difficult. But in this instance, like the black chickpeas, the flavor and culinary potential is unique.
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