pole
manage to hold out despite the odds in
commercial bean culture is simple: taste
and texture.
String and snap beans are non-climbing,
easy to harvest and cheap to
produce. As good as they are, nobody has
come up with a bush bean variety that
has all the good eating qualities of a pole
bean. Virtually everyone who has grown
both — including bush bean producers
— will say pole beans are their favorites
for flavor. Pole beans can be wide and flat
or round and plump, and they come in
shades of green, yellow and purple.
For culinary purposes, beans can be
divided into bush varieties, pole beans,
half runners and dry beans. The glamor-ous
and urbane-sounding haricot verts
are French filet beans (in England they
are called fine beans) and are thinner,
crisper, stringless and harvested when
five to seven inches long and one-quarter
inch thick.
It’s become fashionable to serve green
beans barely cooked so they still have
some crunch and retain their bright
green color. Simmering haricots will
turn them to mush. Admittedly, the
color of Southern-style green beans
isn’t nearly as appealing as that of fresh
green beans.
The key to great green beans is slow
simmering, not boiling, with only a very
slight bubble on them in a little broth for
about 45 minutes — down from the longer
cooking times of the late 1800s because the
tough strings have been bred away. Keeping
the delicious potlikker and pouring it over
the beans at the end is an old-fashioned and
delicious way to enjoy fresh green beans
served truly Southern style.
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YOU
KNOW YOUR COOKING
METHOD.