Beans - an extract from Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain

Likewise alternate years let your cut fields lie fallow,
and the idle ground harden with neglect:
or sow yellow corn, under another star, where you
first harvested beans rich in their quivering pods
Virgil’s Georgics (c.29 bce)

Eating the first of any crop is a happy occasion (with the added piquancy of pride if you have grown it yourself), but there is something particularly pleasing about broad beans. Perhaps it is because for many years our supermarkets ignored them. The ones they now sell in season tend to be older, so you have to painstakingly nick each tough seed coat to get at the soft green meat inside. When I rediscovered home-grown broad beans, popping them from their furry pods to eat raw, I couldn’t believe that these delicate, delicious things bore any relation to the grainy thugs that gang up with tomato sauce and lurk in endless tins. In fact, I was right to be incredulous because, although broad beans and haricot beans belong to the same family, they are entirely different genera.

A thousand or so years ago, dried broad beans were treated rather as tinned beans are today. Beans were easy to grow against a cottage fence, or in a field to provide food for the whole community, and so were cheap and ubiquitous. They were an ideal fuel; nutritious and, once dried, almost indestructible. So long as workers and their families were well stuffed with beans, their overlords might consider their responsibilities duly taken care of, and enjoy their venison and spiced wine with a clean conscience.

Beans are one of the oldest of cultivated plants. They were one of the foods brought to David and his people in the wilderness, and there is evidence that they were cultivated around the Mediterranean from 5,000 years ago and in Asia earlier. Not everybody was a fan. Pythagoras was said to abjure them and Herodotus reported that Egyptian priests wouldn’t even look at them. The Romans attributed both sexual and spiritual properties to the bean, and had quite fancy recipes. Apicius probably has dried beans in mind as he tells you to skim the pot, then add leek, coriander, pepper, lovage, oregano, fennel seed, liquamen (fish sauce) and wine.

Until the Columbian Exchange that brought haricot, runner and ‘French’ bean types to Europe from the Americas of the genus Phaseolus, any mention of ‘beans’ meant broad beans (also called faba or fava beans). The delicate broad beans we now grow in the vegetable garden are the result of plant breeding in the early modern period. Eleventh-century households would have relied throughout the winter on dried Vicia faba var. minor, a variety similar to today’s field, horse or tic beans, which are used for green manure or chicken feed. There are references to beans across the scant Anglo-Saxon literature; in Colloquy on the Occupations, written by Ælfric as a Latin vocab exercise for his pupils in the early eleventh century, the monk’s model pupil says that he eats ‘Wyrta ond æigra, fisc ond cyse, buteran ond beana ond ealle clæne þingc ic ete mid micelre þancunge.’ (‘Leaves and eggs, fish and cheese, butter and beans and all clean things I eat with much thanks.’)

The departing Romans didn’t bequeath their bean recipes, but they do seem to have left the country with a reasonably flat social structure. It is thought that most families were ‘free’ – broadly self-sufficient from farming their own land, or land they tenanted. Increasingly, though, lands were brought together and a hierarchy emerged of royalty, nobility, freemen and peasants of different levels. Farming came to depend on a complicated system of bondage and obligations, depending on the status of the individual (and perhaps the Roman villa gave a model for these early estates). Peasants of some standing on an estate were granted land to grow food for themselves and their families, in return for which they provided, perhaps, two days’ labour a week, or three at ploughing and harvest time. Agreements might include an additional and very specific responsibility, to give the lord’s swineherd six loaves of bread, for example. At the bottom end of the scale, in the early eleventh century, out of a population of around 2 million, every one in ten was a slave, in bond to the lord of the manor or abbey.  Immediately after the Norman Conquest, there was a dramatic fall in the number of free peasants, and a sharp rise in the number of people in bondage as freemen were forced into financial servitude to the Normans. But there were some eventual winners; by 1120 there were no slaves in Norman England. Perhaps the Normans found the system of feeding and housing slaves, who paid nothing back, inefficient; perhaps the moral responsibility weighed heavily on their Christian souls.

The yoke of the unfree Anglo-Saxon peasants was so heavy because their role in producing food was so vital, but the numbers were against them. With a steadily increasing population, there was no room for bargaining power, and freemen might be forced to sell themselves into bondage in times of famine. Ælfric imagines the ploughman’s day from driving the oxen to the field at the crack of dawn, to watering and cleaning out the oxen in the evening after a full day spent ploughing. Even in the bitterest winter weather, fear of his lord sends him out to the fields. ‘Ge leof, micel gedeorf hit ys, forbam ic neom freoh.’ (‘Oh dear, it is much work, because I am not free.’)

A manual of estate management called Rectitudines singularum personarum, probably compiled at Bath Abbey in the early eleventh century, spells out the responsibilities of people across different levels of local society, from thegn (a minor noble) to slave. The thegn’s duty is to the king or an earl (a higher noble); it is civic and military but he isn’t expected to get his hands in the earth or occupy himself with farming, although he’s expected to make sure the king’s ‘animal fences’ are in good order. The reeve managed this estate, on behalf of the landlord, tenants, cottagers, peasants and slaves in roughly descending order of amount of land granted to each. There are concomitant increasing details in their non-monetary obligations and rewards corresponding to their work – chitterlings for the swineherd, buttermilk and cheese for the dairymaid, for example. It was quite detailed because the vocabulary used for the different ranks of peasants and their duties changed from one estate to another. Bonds between some of the freemen and their lords might have been seen by them in terms of ‘commendation’ suggesting allegiance and jurisdiction but not in terms of exchange of goods. By contrast, the shepherd of Bath Abbey was granted twelve nights’ dung at midwinter, one lamb a year, the fleece of one wether (a castrated ram), milk from the flock for seven days after the equinox, and a bowl full of whey or sour milk for the entire summer. It showed that the lower your status the more dependent you were on your lord for your food; only the peasants with the highest status had a degree of self-sufficiency.

Cashflows in society tended to go between craftsmen, artisans, merchants and the landowning echelons. One imagines a lively bartering economy on those workers bound to the land, between the lord’s beekeeper, swineherd, cowherd, shepherd, ploughman, sower, cheese-wright. With the slave alone the obligations are one way; they are not expected to pay food rent (ale, meat or honey) or give anything to the estate except labour and complete obedience. In return the estate makes sure they have an allowance of grain throughout the year, are fed in winter, with extra provisions in Easter and at harvest. On this estate male slaves are also given a strip of land to plough. Female slaves were allocated, alongside the standard rations of corn, plus a sheep and, in summer, whey to drink, a ‘sester’ of beans for food in Lent, when ‘white meat’ (dairy products) and bacon were off the menu (a ‘sester’ is an Anglo- Saxon unit of measurement that varies across time and according to what is being measured and is difficult to define but might be about 5kg).

Across the fields of Anglo-Saxon and early Norman England, the nitrogen-fixing value of beans was probably appreciated, though not understood. Traces of beans in place names often suggest a joint emphasis on the food crop and the fields in which it was grown. The hamlet of Barton in the Beans in Leicestershire frankly acknowledges an ancient relationship with the legume, but it can also be traced in place names containing ‘bin’, ‘been’, ‘ben’ or ‘ban’, which refer to a clearing or field where beans are grown.

They crop up too in archaeological records in York and Winchester, and figure throughout estate management records: Thorney Abbey in the East Anglian fens put aside 40 pence for bean seeds; a spring task, after ploughing, was beana sawan, to sow beans. The collection of Anglo-Saxon scraps of science and medicine known as Leechdoms mentions, unsurprisingly, that they cause flatulence. Eaten new from May onwards, later crops would have been dried and relied on for protein and bulk during the following year’s Lent when meat was forbidden. It gave them something of a reputation as penitential food; ‘I wyl ete beenes, and good stock fysh,’ the pleasure-loving physician Andrew Boorde attributes to the hardy Dane in his idiosyncratic and slightly mocking tour of European habits, A Dyetary of Healthe (1542).

Dried beans were virtually indestructible, though they toughened as they aged. Like bacon and hams, dried pulses took a long time to soften and cook, but in doing so, they helped to absorb some of the salt from bacon or ham; the first recipe of The Forme of Cury, the earliest English cookbook from around 1390, is for an old standby, ‘gronden benes’: dried beans seethed in broth and eaten with bacon. We still enjoy this ancient double act in pea and ham soup, though broad beans have fallen further out of our culinary repertoire than peas. In recent decades we have been more interested in beans from the Americas; originally baked with fatty pork or sausages, until the meat shortages of the Second World War convinced Heinz and other manufacturers to omit them from their tins of baked beans.

The Egyptians, however, have improved their broad bean relationship since the days of Herodotus. Their traditional dish ful medames is made by cooking dried beans with something alkaline, which helps soften and remove the tough outer skins; they are then flavoured with salt, lemon juice, oil and garlic. Modern recipes add other ingredients such as onion, cumin, tomatoes and tahini. I recently saw a recipe for a broad bean burger and realized it was almost identical to ‘benes yfryed’ in The Forme of Cury: beans, seethed almost until they burst, mixed with oil, fried onion and garlic, and flavoured with ‘powdour douce’ – sweet spice.

Dried broad beans in this country have yet to recover from their previous ubiquity. As a nation, we are happy to import other peasant staples, but remain sceptical about our own. Supermarkets and wholefood shops are likely to have all kinds of dried beans for cooking – pinto, butter, red kidney, black turtle, aduki, mung, cannellini, haricot, soya, black-eyed, calypso, borlotti, edamame... but not the broad bean. As I searched in vain for dried broad beans, it was the equivalent, I reflected, of a future food historian traipsing round the local shops – if such things will exist – but failing to find the go-to cheap and easy protein of the twenty-first century: a tin of baked beans.

Extracted from Stuffed: A Political History of What We Eat and Why It Matters by Pen Vogler, £10.99 RRP paperback.

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