Heirbloom Beans, what are they? Heirloom beans are the ones that our fathers, grandfathers and great grandfathers have been growing year after year here in New England. They have selected them over a long period of time to suit the climate and soil and to give them a quality that New England people like. They are mostly either green shell or dry shell beans – usually colored, rarely white and seldom to be bought excepting occasionally on local markets. They come under such names as Jacob’s Cattle, Job’s Cattle, Trout, Coach Dog, Boston Beauty, Horticulture, Arlington, Wild Goose and Soldier. These are just a few of the names. There are many more.
I was first attracted to the multiplicity of types and varieties when judging beans at the county fairs in New Hampshire. Whenever I judged a plate of beans I had never seen before, I put a small handful in my pocket, and in this way I have collected perhaps 150 or 200 samples all told – beans that were grown by somebody, somewhere, and in nearly every case beans that could not be bought from seed companies.
In many cases, these beans are really the best and most productive ones that can be grown in the neighborhood. The navy has always refused to buy colored beans with the possible exception of the red kidney. I do not know why the navy, and for that matter all the armed services, specified white beans. I suspect it was because they could tell bad beans better when the color was white than when it was spotted. But, the home gardener did not mind a colored bean. In fact, I think most of the home folks are like myself; they take pleasure in the thousand and one designs which are found in colored beans. They are interesting as well as nutritious.
Most of these beans have been handed down to us from the Indians. I am told that the Indians were fond of colored beans and, perhaps, carried them around in their pockets the same as I do when I see pretty ones in the Fall. To me, the most striking design is that of Jacob’s Cattle, or Trout – a beautiful white bean spotted with red. It is, perhaps, the second most widely grown bean in New Hampshire. I often wondered where the pattern came from. At a Fair in New York I saw an exhibit of Incan beans that had exactly this same Jacob’s Cattle pattern. Of course, you might say that the Peruvians, noticing the striking pattern and beauty of this bean, bought some of our New Hampshire beans, but I am more inclined to think that it is a pattern which was cultivated thousands of years ago in the mountains of South America.
The Indians are also said to have a sharper sense of taste than the white man, and they prefer colored beans to white beans. In any case, I am sure that all the different types, the ones with spots on them, the ones with stripes on them, the Soldier type of beans and the different colors were common with the Indians long before the white man came to this country. We do have a definite history of the Great Northern bean, which is not a New England Heirloom. It was cultivated by the Mandan Indians of North Dakota previous to the white man’s appearance. The white man simply grew it in large acreages and sold it to the government for navy beans.
In New Hampshire the most widely planted of these beans is the Soldier. This is a bean of kidney shape, with the figure of a soldier around the eye, a jaunty figure in a brownish uniform with square shoulders. It is really a striking design. However, this same design is also found on the Improved Yellow Eye, which is a marrow type bean grown largely in Maine. The Yellow Eye, by the way, is one of the few Heirloom beans that has found its way into commerce.
Then, there is the Horticulture group of beans, and I have often wondered how I could describe or differentiate the Horticultural group. They usually have brownish or reddish stripes. They make fairly acceptable string beans, most excellent shell beans, and are also used by many people as dry beans. They come in many sizes and shapes. Some are pole, some have short runners, others are dwarf. Some have long red pods, others have short, yellowish pods.
I was attracted by a reddish bean of the Horticulture type with beautiful long pods, a shell bean which was shelled and sold in pint boxes on the roadside markets in southern New Hampshire. The bean looked very good to me, but I found that the women folks (lid not buy it because the pods were yellow instead of red. When the bean itself was shelled it had the most beautiful red shells imaginable. Why not cross this productive, long-podded Heirloom bean with a bright colored one like French’s Horticulture, which was hard to shell in the first place and which, when shelled, had white beans? The cross was easily made, but it took about 10,000 plants to produce one that had both red pods and red beans. This cross has gone out on the market as a true dwarf, which is called Flash, and a runner bean which is called Brilliant.
However, in trying out the various types of Horticulture beans that were sent hi, one in particular that came from Littleton, New Hampshire, seemed to stand out. This is called the Littleton Horticulture and is now on the market as a high yielding, resistant bean for New Hampshire. The red colored Horticulture bean I found out afterwards was grown all over New England. One person from southern New Hampshire said that her great grandfather had obtained it in a store in northern New York from a shipment of white beans that had come into New York from Canada, perhaps 75 or 100 years ago. There were just a few of these red beans which granddad took home and planted, but they had been in the family ever since. This bean goes under the name of Souhegan in southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts. In Vermont, it is called the Vermont Cranberry and in Maine, King of the Earlies. It is also called Dora and often by such local names as the Gage bean.
One of the most interesting beans that came in seemed to be a mixture of this King of the Earlies, or Vermont Cranberry, and red kidney. It came to us from Woodstock, New Hampshire, under the name of Joshua Smith bean. We picked out the red kidney ones and soon developed a red kidney type of bean which is two weeks earlier and yields higher. We think it is of much better quality than the real red kidney.
The Jacob’s Cattle is really my favorite because of its pretty spotting. There are many types: some early, others late; some which grow on small, dwarf plants, others on larger ones. One strain that we had grew five feet tall, the largest dwarf bean I have ever seen. By the way, a dwarf bean is a runnerless or bush bean. It is, perhaps, the second most widely grown bean in the state of New Hampshire.
Then, there are many pole beans. ‘the story about these is that they were brought over from Europe in the late ’60’s and ’70’s. The good ones survived; the poor ones fell by the wayside and survived only as Heirloom beans. Some of these are of the Horticulture type, beautiful, large-seeded, high quality beans. Others are true string beans with small and practically inedible beans, being good only for snap purposes. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Wild Goose, famous because of the legend, not because of any particular value. The legend is that a hunter shot a wild goose that had these beans in his crop. He saved them and planted them. I do not think much of the legend myself. In the first place, geese do not eat beans, and in the second place, if they did, ornithologists tell me that they would digest them in an hour or two.
The quality of these beans varies considerably. Some of them are pasty, very much like the California pea bean. Others are dry and rather .coarse grained, perhaps more like the Soldier or Jacob’s Cattle type. Whether you like them or not depends upon your taste. We found practically all of them good, but it seems to me that your taste for them would depend almost entirely upon whether you were accustomed to them.
by R Hepler
