Thursday, December 2, 2021 – Green Beans

The photo is of green beans almondine. I made some today for my lunch. I have made it several times, and it is always tasty. I love the almonds browned in butter plus I add onions and chopped garlic. The recipe I follow also calls for tossing the entire mixture with lemon juice and grated lemon rind. It really freshens up the flavor. I was raised on canned green beans, and there is no comparison to the taste of fresh green beans to me. Although, I had canned green beans at my sister’s after Thanksgiving. She made them with brown sugar and bacon; they were delicious. But there is nothing like the taste of the tender-crisp green beans which I only cook in boiling water for 5 minutes before transferring them to a skillet where the browned almonds, onions and chopped garlic are. The combination of flavors is spectacular. I’m sure there are many more ways you can cook fresh green beans. Let’s learn more about them.

According to Wikipedia, green beans are the unripe, young fruit of various cultivars of the common bean. Immature or young pods of the runner bean, yardlong bean and hyacinth bean are used in a similar way. Green beans are known by many common names, including French beans, string beans, snap beans, snaps and the French name haricot vert. They are also known as Baguio beans or habichuelas in the Philippines, to distinguish them from yardlong beans.

They are distinguished from the many other varieties of beans in that green beans are harvested and consumed with their enclosing pods, before the bean seeds inside have fully matured. An analogous practice is the harvest and consumption of unripened pea pods, as is done with snow peas or sugar snap peas.

Green beans are eaten around the world and are sold fresh, canned and frozen. They can be eaten raw or steamed, boiled, stir-fried or baked. They are commonly cooked in other dishes such as soups, stews and casseroles. Green beans can also be pickled, much like cucumbers are.

A dish with green beans popular throughout the northern U.S. — particularly at Thanksgiving — is green bean casserole, a dish of green beans, cream of mushroom soup and French-fried onions.

Campbell’s cream of mushroom flavored soup variety was created in 1934 and was the first of the company's soups to be marketed as a sauce as well as a soup. It became so widely used as casserole filler in recipes for the hotdish recipes popular in Minnesota that it was sometimes referred to as "Lutheran binder." Like other food companies, Campbell's employed recipe developers to create recipes using its products as part of its marketing strategy.

Dorcas Reilly, creator of the green bean casserole

Dorcas Reilly (1926–2018) created the recipe in 1955 while working in the home economics department at the Campbell's Soup Co. The recipe was created for a feature article for the Associated Press; the requirement was for a quick and easy dish using ingredients most U.S. households kept on hand.

It was called "Green Bean Bake" when the recipe began being printed on soup cans. Initially, the dish did not test well within the company but, in part because of Reilly's persistence, eventually earned a reputation as "the ultimate comfort food." Culinary historian Laura Shapiro called the recipe's use of the crunch fried onion topping a "touch of genius" that gave an otherwise ordinary convenience-food side dish a bit of "glamour."

Food & Wine called it iconic, and Good Housekeeping said that "few dishes are as iconic" as the green bean casserole.

In November 2002, creator Dorcas Reilly, representing Campbell's, donated the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. The donation was followed by a meal featuring the dish. Reilly died October 15, 2018, at the age of 92 in her hometown of Camden, New Jersey.

It was originally marketed as an everyday side dish but became popular for Thanksgiving dinners in the 1960s after Campbell's placed the recipe on the can's label. The recipe popularized the combination of the soup with green beans. Campbell's Soup now estimates that 40% of the cream of mushroom soup sold in the United States goes into making green bean casserole. As of 2020, Campbell's estimated it was served in 20 million Thanksgiving dinners in the U.S. each year. Campbell's in 2020 reported their online version of the recipe is viewed 4 million times each Thanksgiving Day. According to Campbell's as of 2018, the recipe is the most popular ever developed in their kitchens.

Folklorist Lucy Long in 2007 noted that its inclusion on Thanksgiving dinner tables crosses ethnic, socioeconomic and religious differences. She also notes it is included in most popular American cookbooks, mentioned in the media regularly and referred to a "classic," "traditional" and "a Thanksgiving standard." She wrote that the popularity of the dish was related to its categorization as a casserole, which in the U.S. is associated with "communal eating, sharing and generosity" and that the green bean casserole in particular represents the familiar and also the festive.

Some U.S. restaurants serve green beans that are battered and fried, such as green bean tempura. Another popular dish, coo, consists solely of bean seeds that have been removed from their enclosing pods. Green beans are also sold dried or fried with vegetables such as carrots, corn and peas as vegetable chips.

Green beans are a notable source of the flavonol glucuronide miquelianin,

an antioxidant in humans.

Domestication

The green bean — Phaseolus vulgaris — originated in Central and South America, and there's evidence that it has been cultivated in Mexico and Peru for thousands of years.

Characteristics

The first "stringless" bean was bred in 1894 by Calvin Keeney, called the "father of the stringless bean," while working in Le Roy, New York. Most modern green bean varieties do not have strings.

Domestication

The green bean — Phaseolus vulgaris — originated in Central and South America, and there's evidence that it has been cultivated in Mexico and Peru for thousands of years.

Characteristics

The first "stringless" bean was bred in 1894 by Calvin Keeney, called the "father of the stringless bean," while working in Le Roy, New York. Most modern green bean varieties do not have strings.

Plant

Green beans are classified by growth habit into two major groups, "bush" or "dwarf" beans and "pole" or "climbing" beans.

Bush beans are short plants, growing to not more than 2 feet in height, often without requiring supports. They generally reach maturity and produce all their fruit in a relatively short period of time, then cease to produce. Owing to this concentrated production and ease of mechanized harvesting, bush-type beans are those most often grown on commercial farms. Bush green beans are usually cultivars of the common bean Phaseolus vulgaris.

Pole beans have a climbing habit and produce a twisting vine, which must be supported by "poles," trellises or other means. Pole beans may be common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) or yardlong beans (Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis).

Half-runner beans have both bush and pole characteristics and are sometimes classified separately from bush and pole varieties. Their runners can be about 3–10 feet long.

Varieties

Over 130 varieties or cultivars of edible pod beans are known. Varieties specialized for use as green beans — selected for the succulence and flavor of their green pods — are the ones usually grown in the home vegetable garden, and many varieties exist. Beans with various pod colors — green, purple, red or streaked — are collectively known as snap beans, while green beans are exclusively green. Shapes range from thin "fillet" types to wide "romano" types and more common types in between. Yellow-podded green beans are also known as wax beans.

All the following varieties have green pods and are Phaseolus vulgaris, unless otherwise specified.

Bush or dwarf types