Back in 2019 I received the following question about hacked beans.
Hi, Tipper.
My great grandparents and kin moved to Spokane WA from western NC in 1888. My grandmother was born here. Every summer she made hacked-beans with salt pork and a johnny cake. She claimed this was a NC recipe. Have you ever heard of or eaten hacked beans?
P.S. I love your page.
Best regards,
Deborah Akers Mitchell
(Marlow and Nance are my NC family roots)
When I got the question I did what I usually do when someone asks me something about the old ways that I don’t know—I asked Blind Pig readers if they knew about hacked beans. No one knew the answer to Deborah’s question.
A week or so ago S. B. Stone shed some light on the mystery of hacked beans.
“In generations back some of my family grew heirloom pole beans on sapling pole ‘teepees’. After all the green beans were canned, the vines were left to grow. In early fall they hacked down the bean vines, tied and hung them from the rafters in the smoke houses, barns or tobacco sheds with an old tub beneath or a sheet under them. They didn’t eat the bean husks like leather britches, just the dry beans that fell out of the hacked down vines to catch any that popped out as they dried. This could produce buckets of dried beans. Perhaps that is where the term came from.”
Of course there’s no way to know for sure, but S. B.’s comment sure makes sense to me.
Last night’s video: Early Morning Breakfast in the Mountains of Appalachia.
Subscribe for FREE and get a daily dose of Appalachia in your inbox
I like butter stirred in syrup with hot biscuits to sop it up with. Also like grated cheddar cheese stirred up in syrup.
I stir cheddar into pinto beans and green peas. I crumble cornbread into a bowl, sprinkle in grated cheese and then spoon pintos over the top. I finish it off with a good bit of hot sauce. Peas&Cheese is one of my favorite dishes. Canned green peas, drained, with a goodly amount of cheddar added and microwaved until the cheese is melted.
My Dad always had that up until a few years before he passed on. The syrup was our local brand “Golden Eagle.” It was an okay dish for me but I thought there was too much syrup in the way he fixed it.
Is your photo of cranberry beans?
Linda-it is 🙂
I never heard of hacked beans either. Grew up on dry beans and still enjoy them today but don’t recall this kind. Dry beans and cornbread would make a hearty meal. Randy to answer your question, yes, I am one also that puts butter in syrup and honey. When I was at home, we would have molasses and I loved stirring up butter in it. It was like eating candy to me. I have a question for anyone. I grew up with Mama saying side meat, so isn’t that the same as streak o lean? Some say rib side. Then you hear salt pork. We just always called fatback by that name. All makes for great seasoning and of course country ham. None of it is healthy but sure is good while you are eating it. Have a blessed day everyone!!
Gloria, to me fatback, streak of lean, side meat is all about the same. I don’t worry so much about healthy any more, if I don’t get killed, I have got to die with something . It might as well be from eating good tasting unhealthy food. I read a joke one time abut a husband and wife talking about how good everything was in heaven and the husband telling his wife if she hadn’t made them eat healthy food they could have been enjoying heaven 10 years sooner. You know I think mixing butter in syrup or molasses, or honey is sorta like putting peanuts in a our Cokes, it is a true blue southern thang!
“Teepee” bean poles having always been a common site with my family/. Dad would cut a couple of hundred and you could see them standing row after row with climbing pole beans.
At the end of the season he would pull them all up and stack them somewhere out of the weather so he could use them next year.
My great uncle John Shuman had the prettiest garden I ever saw. I’ll never forget the site of his bean poles standing as if he used a tape measure to make sure they were all of the exact length and angle.
I’ve never heard of hacked beans, but that explanation makes sense to me. Thank you for sharing!
Very interesting. I have never heard of these beans. I grew up eating dry beans and still cook them today. Beans and cornbread make a tasty. and complete meal. Really enjoyed the video last night. The food looked delicious! Loved the story about the tour bus!!!! Take care and God bless ❣️
Sharon, I say amen to your comment, especially if the beans were cooked with a chunk of fatback or country ham. I like to add chopped onions to pinto beans.
My mother who is now 90 grew up near Blountville Tennessee. She called them Shuck beans. Her mother would tie them up with strings.
I never heard of hacked beans. We would put our dry crowder peas in a sack and hang them up in an outside building. In the spring time we would beat the sack with a large stick and and let handfuls of them fall from our hand through the air onto a sheet. This allowed the wind to blow the chaff out of them. We didn’t eat these peas but used them for seed.
I enjoyed the video of y’all cooking breakfast on the newer Coleman model 425 stove and using what I think was a Coleman model 295 multi fuel lantern for light. I have cook breakfast many times like this when camping or sometimes at home when the power was off. Food taste better when cooked outdoors. Me and now my son collect and restore Coleman lanterns and have also picked up a good many stoves over the last 20 years. Between the two of us we have 75-100 lanterns (many different models) and about 15-20 stoves. I don’t really collect the stoves. After the mid 80’’s Coleman begin to cheapen their products by using plastic and in the stoves thinner metal. The older ones will last a life time with a little care. Just as a note Coleman dates their lanterns and stoves, the gas fuel lanterns will have the date.on the bottom of fuel tank or on the older models along with the stamped name on the side of the tank. The gas fuel stoves with the red fuel tank will have the dates on the bottom side left tab on the fuel tank. Some of the stoves were not dated and the dates on the propane models are harder to find. I have a question to do with breakfast. I have been eating eating biscuits for the past several mornings along with the old timey syrup. How many of you work or stir butter up in their syrup? I think this goes along with putting peanuts in Coke.
Randy-we always mix our butter into the honey or syrup and sometimes the jelly too 🙂
Tipper, I have never tried mixing it with honey or jelly. I ate biscuits and syrup with the butter mixed in this morning for breakfast. I had my son watch last nights video and he enjoyed watching the Deer Hunting cooking on the Coleman stove and seeing the lantern. When my wife and I would go up into the NC mountains each October, we would buy ac couple of mountain cabbage and a quart jar of sourwood honey if I could find some.
Randy,
Now you are talking about some good eating. Sounds like the “hack” beans are “leather britches” without the “britches”?
Randy,
I found some Tulip Poplar Honey in Popular NC back some years ago and it was some of the best I have ever eaten.
I don’t know if I have ever ate tulip popular honey. There is a popular tree on our property with a trunk so large it would take two men to reach around it. At one time it had a swarm of wild honey bees in it but I don’t guess anyone every robbed it for the honey.
We ate lots of honey butter growing up. Few months ago I found recipe for honey butter, had usual honey and butter in it, but also a pinch of cayenne pepper! You can’t taste it, you just know it tastes much better.
Never heard of hacked beans or putting bean poles in the rafters. Makes sense to me though as being an efficient way to get the very last ‘shelleys’. They likely had a little smoky taste. Only thing puzzles me is ‘hacking’ down the bean poles with the vines instead of pulling them up. I just pulled up my rattlesnakes bean poles and vines and there were still a few green pods on them.
Hello Ron, if you leave the roots of the pole beans in the ground, the nitrogen that they contain help to fertilize the soil for next years garden. I just learned about it this year!
Wow. Such questions I would have been wondering for a while. You have yet to be stumped by questions that are put to you and the resources you have to sometime help out. I learn sometime every day and it usually begins in the early morning. Who knows, that name might have been made up or used to ‘splain’ something that no one had an answer to. Most of the time I share the knowledge you impart with my children and/or in-laws. Thanks and God Bless.
You brought back fun memories of the I Love Lucy show when Ricky tried hard to understand something crazy that Lucy had done. He always said ‘splain it to me Lucy’. We lovingly say it now to any family member that has done something irritating. Sometimes it’s just fun to remember where the word comes from. I sure loved Lucy!
It’s a good thing you have such a good memory, Tipper, or we would have never had the answer to the question of what hacked beans were.
We sure are a bean eating people. I would make a guess that dried beans may have been the first dried/preserved foods among our earlier people.