BEAN YEAR

Peanuts – Arachis hypogaea

Impress people at a party: Peanuts have cleistogamous flowers. Which means they have flowers that never open and are self fertile. It is their cleistogamous flowers underground , another fun word: geocarpy, that produce the pea-nut that we eat. 

Peanuts are incredibly common and industrially grown around the planet. Originating in South America, after the Great Exchange (a term related to “Columbian Exchange” that de-centers Europe since that’s a very myopic perspective) peanuts exploded in popularity. I have found peanuts in Kola Nut imported from Ghana and Mali. In Cinnamon imported from India. In dehydrated Onions imported from China. And obviously in every case we had to throw away this food because peanut is also, famously, a significant allergen. 

We talked a little about bean family allergens in Bean Box 3 with the fava beans. What I would like to stress here is that allergens, a body’s over response to proteins, are much broader than just the FDA big 9, two of which are peanuts and soybeans. In other countries and systems they include a larger variety of plants. 

So Peanuts are ubiquitous in part because of the work of George Washington Carver at the Tuskegee Institute on improving soil for poor farmers. Being from Alabama myself I am proud to suggest you do more to look into this hero. I was in the Geography building at the University of Alabama once during my undergraduate, the same building where George Wallace*did the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door (boo! boo! boo!), and a professor was retiring and piled up a wall of books outside his office as, basically, garbage. In the pile I found USDA agricultural yearbooks from up to around the early 50s. Related to J Russell Smith we talked about with the Bean Tree Crops in the last box, before the ready cheap availability of synthetic or guano based agricultural fertilizers, the USDA did a lot of work into improving soil quality with cover crops, primarily in the bean family. These include things like vetch, fava, clover, field peas, soy beans, and so on. Peanuts, in particular are very good at this in warm places, and the work of Carver and later these USDA publications really pushed peanuts as a cover crop and crop to grow alongside your main crops or in close rotation, especially for poor farmers in The South and other warm places. 

On a large scale, we have lost a lot of this tradition as we simply didn’t need to worry about it. But in the last couple decades as artificial and removed fertilizers have become more scarce, there has been renewed research into using cover crops on massive scale. Exciting times. 

*If there were heroes like George Washington Carver, then there were also many villains: a continuous thread of people going back to at least the Civil War who, unfortunately, died happy in their beds that got us to the mess we are in now. (as we sing inthe song, Sweet Home Alabama, Boo! Boo! Boo!)

Peanuts, raw in-shell

The perfect expression of the Peanut is Boiled Peanuts.If you’ve never had boiled peanuts before, this is what I suggest you do with the raw in shell peanuts in front of you. 

It reminds you that peanuts are a bean. It captures their straight flavor. And it squarely situations peanuts as an everyday humble all the time snacking food. 

The peanuts I’ve chosen are from Jimbo’s Jumbo, which is one of the largest peanut processors in the US. At my day job, when I buy peanut butter industrially, like 40,000 pounds a week, I get in from Jimbo Jumbo. I’m surprised I was actually able to find these available in “small” 50 pound pack sizes. 

These are the basic Virginia peanuts, large kernals meant for snacks, there are other types, runners for peanut butter, Spanish have a high oil content for candies and  oil, and Valencias are sweet and grown in New Mexico, good for roasting. I thought about going with Valencia, I might next year, but for this first peanut box I wanted to showcase the definitive mass grown American peanut, which is the Virginia from Jimbo Jumbo’s which is owned by Hampton Farms. 

There is absolutely no way I could capture the history of boiled peanuts as well as this Serious Eats article: 
https://www.seriouseats.com/history-southern-boiled-peanuts

Nor could I explain how to cook them as well as this Southern Living article: 
https://www.southernliving.com/recipes/classic-boiled-peanuts

My own history with boiled peanuts in Alabama, I know that really infusing them with salt is crucial to the experience. As we talked about in Box 1, salt your soaking water, then salt the cooking water too for any bean, like these, that need a pre-soak and long cooking time. 

Boiled peanuts, like slimy okra, elicit strong reactions. As the article mentions, roasted peanuts makes you think of nuts, but boiled peanuts is much more akin to edamame (boiled fresh soy beans, also mentioned in this Bean Letter) or garbanzo beans from a can. Please let me know what you think? 

Or of course you can roast them 😊

Peanuts, Cacahuates Japones – Japanese Peanuts​

I try to capture the breadth of each type of bean we review in this project. It is harder to think of a presentation of peanuts that is more opposite boiled peanuts than these cracker peanuts. Invented in Mexico by a Japanese immigrant, these are basically a sweetcracker wrapped around a peanut, yum. 

They come in a variety of flavors but I have chosen the most common default flavor. These have a synergy with the soybeans since soy sauce is used in them!

I’m considering doing a Summer Bean Box with these that would have a mix of flavors. There are many versions, from seaweed to halva coated cracker peanuts. 

Other forms of peanuts are the candied peanuts I send in the Sweet Bean Box, peanut oil, or the wonderful food: Peanut Butter. Maybe some day I’ll be set up to send you the fanciest peanut butter possible, but until then I think the range we’ve got here does a good job showing the breadth of this bean. 

Bambara – Ground nut

One reason that Peanuts were so quickly adopted by west Africans when they were introduced from South America is that west Africans were already familiar with a bean family plant that had cleistogamous flowers that formed their bean pod below ground, geocarpy: Bambara groundnut, Vigna subterranea. Vigna is the genus that has black eyed peas, adzuki beans, mung beans, yard beans, etc. The genus will be featured in Bean Box 6.

As the Serious Eats article suggests, since peanuts were brought to The South by enslaved Africans, then the method of boiling them to make soup, which is still done in African to this day, in part originated in the soups made from Groundnut. 

I personally love African Peanut soup and if you don’t want to use the raw peanuts to make boiled peanuts nor roasted peanuts, then this is another great way to Say Yes to Beans and explore. The variety of the use of peanuts expands from there in dishes from all over the world. Possibly the most eaten by humans bean family plant.