Still More Beans

My previous post (Beans and More Beans) elicited a comment from a friend, who remarked, “I didn’t know you shelled butter beans.” I had not anticipated that response. So let me extend my comments.

You don’t want to eat the shells, so you extract the beans first and cook them. But you don’t have to do those two things in that order. Butter beans in the shell can be fried in olive oil, sprinkled with salt, then eaten. To eat them, put the fried shell with beans into your mouth, then pull the shell out of your mouth while using your teeth to extract the beans from the shell. I have not eaten beans that way but to each his own.

It’s not just beans. English peas, black eyed peas, and chickpeas (garbanzo beans) must be shelled, too. You’ve heard the expression, two peas in a pod. The pod is the shell. Inside the pod, the peas are identical and sit so close together that they touch. Hence, the phrase two peas in a pod is used to describe two people who are very much alike. As with beans, you split open the peapod and rake the peas out with your finger or thumb, then cook the peas. (You will probably want to soak black eyed peas and chickpeas before cooking them.)

As one would expect, there are shelling machines to do this for commercial farms. For home gardeners and those who occasionally buy unshelled beans and peas because they prefer the flavor and nutrition of fresh produce, a shelling machine can save a lot of time. But a shelling machine may not be worth its cost if its for occasional use. It may be better (and a lot more fun) to gather family members on your front porch and shell beans together while you gossip about the goings-on in the neighborhood. Make sure one of your helpers is a child who can one day pass on the shelling tradition. If the kid turns out to be an engineer, he or she may invent a transporter that “beams” the beans or peas out of the shell and into a bowl. Admittedly, that process loses much of the magic of shelling beans together.

It would not surprise me to hear someone ask me, “Would you like me to print you some beans?” We live in strange and wondrous times.

Note: In my previous post I said it was my experience growing up in the South that butter beans were small and green and lima beans were larger and cream-colored. In parts of the US, small green butter beans may be called baby lima beans and lima beans may be called butter beans. In the UK, the term butter bean is used almost exclusively to refer to a lima bean. Regardless, butter beans and lima beans are the same bean. (Unless I’m wrong. But what are the odds of that?)