HERB - Beans and onions

Rooscc@aol.com Rooscc at aol.com
Sun Jun 7 07:29:51 PDT 1998


Thank you, Raisya.

The word for kidney beans on the list was "fasiolum."
This was taken over as Phaseolus to be the name of a
genus of New World beans--and it is amazing to me how 
many beans there were in the New World, including
the one we now call kidney bean. Harvey says the kidney
bean of antiquity would now be placed in the genera 
Dolichos or Vigna. 

Elsewhere in his book, Harvey seems to incline toward
Vigna species, but I don't know what modern bean
this would be. Sturtevant has a "cowpea" or "Jerusalem
pea" Vigna catjang Walp. which he says was grown in
Portugal and Italy and also in "the southern states,
this species has many permanent varieties, as Red
pea, Black-eyed pea and so on." (Anybody think black-
eyed peas look like kidney beans?)

Sturtevant also has V. glabra Savi., "Chinese dolichos" 
or "clay pea,"  a native of Africa, cultivated in Egypt.
"There are several varieties of this bean in India, 
white, red, dun, green, black; they also vary greatly 
in size but are distinguished by their form, which differs
from all the other kinds in the beans being truncated
at either end." This one was formerly classified as
Dolichos. I don't know its current classification.

[OH, in case you didn't know (I didn't for a long while),
that L. or some other abbreviation following the
genus-species name is the person who definitively
classified the plant. The genus-species is printed
in italics, this abbreviation is not. This is handy to
have in case a plant has been reclassified.)

The question marks after the onions/shallots in
the list I typed: In the original they were (58) uniones,
(62) asclonicas, and (63) cepas. One possibility is
that uniones = onions, and asclonicas and cepas are 
two types of shallots (Shallot = Allium ascalonica L., 
"onions of Ascalon").  But cepa generally stands for
onion (A. cepa L.), so uniones may be A. fistulosum L.,
the Welsh onion, "ciboule" in French and "chibol" in
medieval England.

Did all that make you dizzy? It did me.
Alysoun
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