[Sca-cooks] OOP - Green beans was Turkey, again!

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Pixel, Goddess and Queen:

>Doesn't explain why, in my family, it's always been just plain green
>beans. Our reason is apparently due to food allergies--Mom couldn't eat
>corn, so we had to have something else that qualified as a "green
>vegetable", and peas would have been redundant. Even though there was only
>one person eating the Le Sueur Tiny Mushy Nasty Taste-Like-The-Can Peas.
>If there were toasted almonds scattered atop the beans, Mom could pick
>them out.

I used to like the Le Seur peas (with pearl onions!) when I was a
kid, and considered the taste of the can a plus. I can't explain why,
and wouldn't make any rash promises about choking down a single bite
of them now.

Re green beans: here's what I tink.

A while back (oh, maybe ten years ago), I was exposed to the concept
of the green beans with bacon that occasionally turns up, I gather,
on Southern Thanksgiving menus. I tried them, they were okay, and I
reached the conclusion that the fact that they had been cooked nearly
to a mush, more or less the consistency of canned green beans, was
not so much an indicator of bad quality cooking, as of different
tastes and expectations, some of them quite reasonable under their
circumstances.

For example, I actually prefer things like cabbage (sometimes!),
kale, and collard, turnip, or mustard greens, well-cooked. They're
not bad food in the sense that they were overcooked, they were just
cooked with a view that they should be tender. They're probably more
digestible that way, too.

But anyway, I've since been told, and also read, that the concept of
the green beans with bacon probably stems from a tradition of eating
dried green beans (whole pods), commonly known as leather-breeches
beans, which were usually cooked for a long time, with bacon or
something like it, like most other beans in the American South. The
object, of course, was to cook them until tender enough to eat
without breaking a tooth. This logic (and, perhaps, flavor
expectation) has presumably been extended to the fresh (or frozen, or
canned) green beans with bacon. But another big factor is that these
beans were preserved and could be eaten out of season, and as such,
made a good vegetable to serve at a late-Autumn, post- harvest feast.

Now, of course, the season being theoretically irrelevant now, what
with refrigerated trucking and such, we can use fresh green beans (or
whatever type we prefer) to fill this niche.

Adamantius