[Sca-cooks] Beans and Flour

[Johnna Holloway]

We had a discussion  about the kidney and soy beans showing up in al-Warraq back in April of this year.
On the 24th I wrote
Ken Albala in his prize winning book Beans mentions that 
"Most older authors translate phaselus as kidney beans, which obviously it was not."

This would include people translating the classical authors.

I first encountered this in John Harvey's Mediaeval Gardens where he writes 
"The kidney bean of antiquity, not that of modern times, is meant by fasiolum. In this case too an American genus of plants Phaseolus, has usurped the name of a plant which now be placed in the genera Dolichos or Vigna." page 30
and later 
"On the continent there had been Kidney Beans from classical times, belonging to the
modern genera Dolichos or Vigna; all forms of French Beans and Scarlet Runners belong to the genius
Phaseolus and are of American origin." page 121

Was she discussing the classical "kidney bean" by chance?

and then on the 25th Urtatim wrote (snipped for length)

First, on page 798 Nasrallah discusses lubya, "beans". In the generic heading, she equate them to kidney beans (New World Phaseolus) and black-eyed peas (Old World Vigna). She mentions that the Arabic word "fasulya" was used in medieval times, although rarely. In modern times, phaseolus is the New World bean genus. This may be where some of her confusion comes. However, the genus Vigna, which is Old World, includes a large number of different beans, some of which were formerly included in the genus Phaseolus. And Nasrallah does go on to mention some of them.

When discussing "lubya bayda", p. 798, literally "white beans", Nasrallah equates them to haricot or kidney beans. Then she quotes another medieval Arabic author, Ibn Baytar, comparing these particular beans to kidneys and saying some may be tinged with black or red. It seems to me that these WHITE beans are not our modern red kidney beans, which Nasrallah does not make clear.

snipped
And to add to the problems she lists "lubya Yamaniyya", "Yemenite beans", which Nasrallah says are white soy beans. I am skeptical that they are soy, although at least soy are Old World. Again, there are many spp. of Vigna, so rather than soy these may be one of them.

Urtatim (that's oor-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita
__________________________

I suspect the person to write and ask about the soybeans would be Ken Albala since he includes soybeans in his book. He does not mention the Middle East in connection with them. I re-read that chapter this evening.

Johnnae

On Aug 12, 2013, at 7:18 PM, David Friedman wrote:

> Nasrallah, the translator of al-Warraq, lists soy beans among the beans used in the  Middle-east in his period. Does anyone know of evidence for or against? She also interprets one of the period beans as kidney beans which, according to everything else I've seen, are New World, which makes me think she may be too willing to deduce what a word meant then from what it means in modern middle-eastern cooking, with which she is obviously very familiar. Alternatively, of course, she may be using "kidney bean" to refer to something different from what we call kidney beans.