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An Exclusive to MollieKatzen.Com
Dear Friends,
This month we have here on the Kitchen Table Gazette: Andy Griffin, who, along with his wife Julia, farms delicious organic produce in Watsonville, California. Andy is a terrific writer as well as a dedicated farmer. I'm pleased he has permitted me to share his vision with you.
Yours In health,
Mollie
By Andy Griffin
Mariquita Farm
Organically Grown Vegetables, Berries and Herbs
P.O. Box 2065 Watsonville, CA 95077
(831)761-3226
www.mariquita.com
BEANS FOR BEDTIME by Andy
Fee-fi-fo-fum; I smell an acre of favas in full bloom. The
sweet fragrance of our farm's towering, robust stand of
fava beans prompts me to sniff critically at contemporary
accounts of Jack and his single beanstalk. What variety of
bean did Jack plant? What magic can a bean possess?
What was really going on once upon a time in fairy
tale England?
The tall but slow-growing fava bean, Vicia faba, was
northern Europe's only bean before Columbus encountered
America. Favas, called broad beans in England, thrive in
Britain's cool, most climate and have been a major crop
there for ages. Our earliest published record of Jack and
his beanstalk is in English but dates back only to 1734, well
after the Spanish landfall in the new world. So while broad
beans were the traditional English bean it remains possible
that Jack's beans, traded from a leprechaun for an old dry
cow, could have been any one of the more than three
thousand cultivars of the American kidney bean,
Phaseolus vulgaris.
Jack planted his bean and climbed its stalk to the sky
where a giant lived in a castle set among the clouds.
First Jack stole a sack of coins, then he slipped off with
a goose that laid golden eggs, and finally he took a magical
harp that sang. Jack killed the giant and used his new
wealth to attract a lovely bride. Jack owed his elevation
in social status from a poor single cowboy living at home
with his mother to a wealthy brideholder to a bean. The
only question is which kind?
The dramatic growth rates that warmth-loving Phaseolus
vulgaris can achieve during optimum summer conditions
could well have appeared magical to folks in the old world,
accustomed as they were to the sedate pace of the
overwintered fava. If you were an English farmworker
responsible to train the new sprawling Phaseolus beans
to poles it would certainly seem as though the American
beans could stretch out to touch heaven overnight.
But vulgaris means common in botanical Latin and Jack's
bean was anything but common. Ironically, at the beginning
of the eighteenth century when Jack's tale was first printed
Vicia faba was not only more common than Phaseolus vulgaris
but more magical as well. Broad beans had been a staple food
for people in the Mediterranean basin and central Asia for over
thirty thousand years. As the fava bean was passed from
generation to generation from the stone age forward it's
reputation was polished to a mystical luster.
 Rameses III offered 11,998 jars of shelled favas to the Nile
god. The hollow, tubular stems of the fava were understood
by the priests of ancient Egypt to be channels through which
souls passed to the underworld. Favas, which grew through
Egypt's mild winters, were an obvious sign of rebirth, too.
The tender fresh bean the fava plant yielded in early spring
was the first edible gift of the year from the ancestors to the living.
Later, in Christian Europe, a dried fava bean was traditionally
folded into the batter of a Twelfth Night Cake at Christmas before
the dessert was set into hot ashes to bake. One third portion
of the cake would be dedicated to the virgin mother and one
third part offered to the Magi. These pieces were offered to
the poor and the remaining third got eaten at home. Whoever
got the bean in their mouth was "King" for the day. From
Rameses the third to Henry the eighth and from the underworld
to the heavens broad beans were agents of transformation.
Jack's poverty, trickery, and violence is faithfully reported in the
beanstalk myth but no systematic botanical details are included
that might help any of us to pick out a magic bean from among
all the common ones and follow his example. Artists illustrating
the story invariably picture the kidney shape of a Phaseolus
bean in Jack's palm. This is understandable, if unwarranted.
The role that dried broad beans ground into flour once served
in belly-stuffing starchy gruels has largely been taken over by
the potato in the last two hundred years. Especially here in the
Americas where hot summers favor the Phaseolus fava beans
have been more or less forgotten. But I think Jack's bean was
a broad bean. Phaseolus beans, though they can extend to fifteen
feet in length are lax and must climb on something if they are to
reach the sky. No edition of Jack and the Beanstalk makes mention
of a magical bean pole to support a magical Phaseolus.
Maybe deceptive, sloppy botany is appropriate for Jack and the
Beanstalk because Fee-fi-fo-fum; I smell an English scam at the
heart of this fairy tale. The immoral to Jack's story is that luck,
trickery, and murder gain you the girl but the real fairy tale here
is that any agricultural endeavor can yield riches overnight, but
there is magic in a broad bean. Favas duplicate themselves so
prolifically and reliably that they remind us of the metaphoric
geese that lay golden eggs. Favas fix atmospheric nitrogen
as they grow and enrich the soil for the crops that follow. It
still takes work to live happily ever after through farming. Jack
is such a hustler I suspect that he sold the cow and then spent
the money on wenches and beer after the farmers market. Then
he stole a neighbor's beans on the way home and made up a
fairy tale about a leprechaun to satisfy his credulous mother.
I will try my version of the story out on my kids the next time I
do bedtime stories and see how it goes over. Wish me luck.
Copyright 2003 Andy Griffin
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