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

[Terry Decker]

The version of this I'm familiar with, first you cook the bacon, then the
cut beans are sauted in the bacon fat for a while, then a little
water is added to the beans to finish cooking them.  I can see where dried
beans might require significantly longer times and might prove mushy.

Oh and it's not just a southern thang.  This method of preparing green beans
alos occurs in the Midwest.

Bear


>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