Over the weekend we had our first mess of green beans from the garden. They were so good!
We picked a whole lot of rattlesnake beans, about three bushels. I knew Granny would be tickled to death over them so we split them with her.
A few of the other varieties are beginning to come in too.
One of the old beans Debbie at Bryson Farm Supply shared with us is named preacher bean. A few folks said they bet it would turn out to be similar if not the same thing as the rattlesnake bean, but they are very different in appearance.
The preacher bean is a very full and pretty bean, but not near as long as the rattlesnake. We picked enough of them for a mess and that’s what we ate. I really liked them so I hope we can save enough seed from the plants to share with Debbie and keep for ourselves too.
Here’s the excerpt from mine and Jim’s cookbook about green beans
HOLY GREEN BEANS
Productive, easy to grow, good for the soil, wonderfully tasty, and delightfully diverse, beans in many forms figure in Appalachian diet to a degree of prominence matched only by corn, potatoes, and pork. Pole beans, half runners, cutshorts, and bunch beans provide green beans for cooking in traditional fashion along with leather britches and pickled beans. Then there are butter beans, October beans, all sorts of dried (or “winter” beans) and more. They are easily stored, lend themselves to all sorts of recipes, and have always been an Appalachian favorite.
Although Momma never used the term, after her death the family frequently referred to a big pot of green beans as “holy green beans.” In other words, they had had the hell cooked out of them. I think we got the humorous yet accurate description from a wonderful lady, Beulah Suddereth, who helped out some with household chores as Mom’s health began to decline and continued to do so for Dad after his mate of many decades was gone.
Whatever the origin of the terminology, in our household there was none of this modern tender-crisp, cooked with a touch of olive oil nonsense when it came to green beans. You “looked” your beans (checked them for bugs or pieces of trash), strung and broke them, and put the beans in a big pot with plenty of water. Two or three slices of streaked meat were then added and the pot set on a burner. Once the water was brought to a rolling boil Momma would reduce the heat and the beans would simmer, all the while absorbing some of the streaked meat’s salty goodness, for hours. She would check occasionally and add water when needed, but otherwise it was just a matter of letting time and heat work their wonders. Incidentally, much the same approach was used for cooking various types of dried beans, crowder peas, cabbage, mustard or turnip greens, poke salad (the final go round after it had been cooked and drained twice) and the like.
JC
Speaking of the cookbook we have a few events coming up.
This Saturday, July 29, I will be signing cookbooks at the Cherokee County Museum in Murphy, NC from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. The museum will have books available for purchase.
And on Tuesday, August 22 Jim and I both will be at the Marianna Black Library in Bryson City, NC from 4:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. This is a drop-in event so we won’t be doing a presentation but will be glad to sign your cookbook and answer any questions you might have.
We would love to see you if you are able to make it out! You can pick up a copy of our cookbook here.
Last night’s video: First MASSIVE Bean Picking of the Summer – Matt was Right about Rattlesnake Beans!
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Yep, that’s the way I learned to cook beans!
Yum!!
We got started up at my MIL place really late with the garden…and then a bear tore down the fence to get to the apple trees, so rabbits got and looked to have eaten most of the beans. We fixed the fence, (put up a solar electric fence with a bunch of netting around the bottom), so the critters have stayed out. Praise the LORD, the beans seem to be coming back!! Now we aren’t gonn near the beauty you and Matt have, but just growing something for my MIL was really therapeutic after so many years of her living isolated and alone up on her WV mountain with only deer for company (Paul my hubby was a Marine for 26 years, so we have been gone). Seeing the garden bounty come in has given her such a new lease on life! She doesnt have electricity or running water, so she cooks on a 2 burner camp stove and has to figure ways around refrigeration. The ways she is using zucchini to make little apple pie fritters and tortillas is amazing, lol! I just can’t wait til we have a right mess of beans…
My beans will be ready to pick here in a few days. I know I’m gonna have my hands full. We love greens beans. I planted yhis yr an old timey bean call Myers beans. they have been passed down many years. They are so delicious. My daughter and I went last night and one of her friends gave us a huge box of Turkey Crawls. I’m gonna have to can those. Say hi to sweet granny and prayers for her.
My grandfather lived to be age 104 & he ate green beans every day of his entire life! Fresh during garden season & canned throughout Fall, Winter, & Spring. After Ma passed the time she had difficulty putting up green beans, I helped & after she passed , I took on full responsibility for Pa & made sure he had green beans ever day!
Blessings
I loved watching you and Mat pick those beautiful rattlesnake green beans! I am going to find the seed so we can grow them next year! I can just imagine how happy Granny was with her beans! Thank you for sharing your Arden and lives with us! God bless you and yours❤❤
I think I’ll go to The Farmer’s Market in the morning and see can I buy some fresh green beans and cook the hell out of them.Cussing is funny to me since Mom and Pop fussed and cussed each other their whole lives.They loved each other I suppose(stayed married for over 50 years)but they durn sure didn’t like each other.
We call them snaps or string beans. Nothing like a pot of snaps cooked with ham or bacon or smoked jowl. My favorite vegetable.
What a bounty of green beans you are going to have! I enjoyed watching you and Matt pick them. I know they were delicious and it’s wonderful that yours are doing so well and Granny can have green beans even though hers didn’t do well. The Lord always provides.
Oh my goodness, looking at those rows of green beans makes me happy:) I’ve told my sons many times, you can have what some think are delicious meals being steak, lobster, shrimp, pork chops, or prime rib and they are o.k., but to ME the MOST DELICIOUS meal is green beans cooked slow and long like my Mother cooked them, a fresh sliced garden tomato, an onion, and cornbread. Now I like mustard greens, collard greens cooked with beets and squash too but my favorite is green beans!! Wow is all I can say, after seeing you and Matt fill two 5 gallon buckets. I must say I wish we had known how well those cow panels worked when Daddy was still alive and growing his beautiful garden. Mother and Daddy would have loved to have had those back in the 80’s. Prayers for Granny and it brings smiles to my face to think of smiles in her face when she saw all the fresh garden goodness Matt took to her.
I don’t have room for a garden but I do plant things in pots, just because planting and watching them grow is in my blood. Last year I planted yard long beans for the first time. They made enough beans for us to each, to share and to put some in the freezer. Gotta try these rattlesnake beans!
growing up in california, i always steamed green beans, two or three minutes, maybe. when i moved to florida to be with my mother and got to know her family, i mentioned that i didn’t cook green beans for very long. “me, neither,” said aunt nina.”never more than 45 minutes!”
I like beans of any kind, green beans or dried, better the next day. Cook ’em all day, let them get cold, refrigerate them over night and heat them up the next day. I keep plenty of liquid in them the first day then cook it down the next.
I like bean dip and Scoops. I tried to imitate the Frito Lay brand the other day (that’s the dip, not the Scoops). My version was at least as good as theirs (which I already loved), if not better.
There were recipes on the internet that looked interesting but all them started with a 15 ounce can of beans. I’m looking for something I can can or freeze. When I am hongry 15 ounces is barely enough for one sitting.
My experiment isn’t over. My dip ended up a little too thick to eat cold (the chips break) and the bean skins don’t mash up as good as I would like, but the taste is perfect.
Hongry is not a typo, if you don’t already know, is hungry² or even ³. Hungry times hungry times hungry!
My father used to say that had never met a bean that he didn’t like. I feel the same way! I cook a pot of dried beans at least once a week. Pintos, white, navy, red , cranberry, they’re all wonderful. A ham hock or other cured pork is always added to flavor the beans. Green beans cooked southern style for hours with new red potatoes, some onion and cured pork makes a dish fit for a king. Of course, cornbread and or biscuits are always part of the meal!
Love half-runner green beans cooked with fatback for a few hours, cornbread, maybe some corn
and tomatoes and that’s a meal! My beans aren’t producing yet and I’m sure there won’t be enough
to can. I did visit a local farm market last week and bought enough cucumbers to make a run of
bread and butter pickles, but the green beans they had didn’t look good. I’ll find some rattlesnake
beans and try them next year. Tomatoes are finally beginning to come in and, boy, are they good!
Corn on the cob and a sliced summer tomato, now, that’s heaven on earth!
Green beans have always been a staple in our family. I love green beans with new potatoes cooked together. That with corn bread is a meal! Enjoyed your video last night. What a beautiful sight to look down that bean patch – so lush and green. Praying for Granny and all! Take care and God bless ❤️
Tipper, your post solved an old, old ‘bean mystery’ for me. Thank you. I had often wondered why my mother cooked green beans as she did – cooked to mush with fatback bacon, salt and pepper. Now I know. She was simply preparing them as her father, a fiddle-footed Appalachian man, had liked them. Her beans surely were Holy Green Beans!
I was cooking green beans when a friend dropped by a few years ago. Two hours later, the green beans were still cooking. He had never seen anything like that and accused me of boiling all the nutrients out. Cooked the daylights out of them is how he described it when he called to ask his momma how long she cooked green beans. She told him 15 or 20 minutes was plenty time. It’s a good thing she seasoned with butter as 20 minutes wouldn’t be enough time for the bacon to get done.
God bless Granny!
Tell him he needs to keep a lid on the pot so the nutrients can’t get out!
I just watched your video and your garden is beautiful and massive! If I was your age again I would till up the sunny side of my yard and go for it. I have a 20×4 raised bed and it is doing very well with zuchini and bush beans. The last of the small patch of lettuce finally gave out after providing for 3 months. I planted Provider, Slenderette and Tendergreen bush beans in a 5×4 area and have managed to get 10 quarts of beans canned in two weeks. A dent in the bucket compared to yours and what I used to can 25 years ago, but it makes me happy to get out there and “play”. I agree with Granny, beans are the easiest and fastest things to can with the pressure canner, and putting up even just a little nowadays is very satisfying to me.
I love Norman Chester’s comments, I feel he uplifts all of us and shepherds us along. Thank you, Norman! And Randy’s reminiscing with sweet memories are a treasure to me. My family does not live nearby except for my sister. We are blessed to have each other and our growing-up memories. I, too,
miss the dear ones that have flown away, but trust the Lord to take my hand every day and pull me along.
I cooked a pot of fresh blue lake green beans last week week with country ham and new potatoes in them. To a true southerner all beans have to be cooked with a chunk of either fatback, side meat, or streak of lean (all three similar) throwed in with them and cooked slow for awhile.I have never heard of beans being called preacher or holy beans because of cooking the hell out of them. I heard the Cajun cook, Justin Wilson say to cook good scrambled eggs you had had beat the hell out of them. I have been shelling Mississippi purple hull crowder peas over the weekend and plan on cooking a pot of them along a chunk of fatback in them maybe today.
I believe God controls the weather so I try not to complain, but my area has had about 2 tenths of an inch of rain in last 5 weeks or so. There has been storms all around me for the last 5 days but we have not had enough rain to even measure, about a 5 minute shower last night that hardly wet the top of the ground. I am glad we did not get the bad storms that came out NC last week and seem to have followed the Georgia/SC line. Everything is drying up, some people have begin to plow their gardens up. The foreseeable weather forecast calls for more of the same, hot dry days of mid to upper 90 degrees with feel like temps around a 100 degrees or more with less than 5% chance of rain. I wish we could get back some of those cool wet spring days we were commenting about a few months ago. I hurt myself Saturday by getting heat exhausted after staying on a riding lawn mower and cutting about 5-6 acres of dry grass. I was aching and nauseated Saturday evening.
randy, please don’t do that anymore! heat exhaustion is no joke and can come on sudden. and it’s like to get worse before it gets better. just let the grass go!
We always had them with new potatoes thrown in and it was the main meal. Yours look so good!
Tipper, your green beans cooking look delicious! I’d say a side of buttery cornbread, a boiled tater, a sliced onion and sliced tomato would set this fare off in marvelous light! I picked rattlesnake beans Saturday and was greatly surprised they’re ready. I got purple beans too but can’t remember the name. (They’re supposed to turn green in cooking.) They’ll be ready to pick in the next few days. My hollyhocks, scarlet sage, fig tree, hibiscus, begonia, marigolds, Bells of Ireland, morning glories, Mexican Heather, lavender, peppermint patch 5 feet high and taking over across, tiny spearmint patch, cat mint patch, repotted Boston ferns, Bridal Veils, pumpkins, a few Concord grapes, plentiful green beans, tomatoes, some lettuce, squash, cucumbers and all the beautiful sweet peas really brighten and make my day!!! God bless you all here and especially Granny!!! May you have a blessed day in our Lord and His Majesty! Oh yeah, I been thinking about them coyotes, Tipper. I remember blasting at those rascals a good part of many nights in Lascassas, TN. If you’re coming for to hurt me or mine, I ain’t got a bit of trouble taking out a mangy coyote. Shooting and blowing stuff up is a lot of fun when the situation requires it…. Lol
I cooked a big pot of fresh green beans yesterday with fresh corn, speckled butter beans, cornbread, salmon patties and cantaloupe. It was so good. Love cooking summer vegetables. Enjoy reading your posts and watching y’all on you u tube. Have a blessed day!
Glad you get so much from your north slope farmstead. I planted rattlesnake and October beans but neither have done well. Won’t be enough to can. Thinking about a second planting of the rattlesnake since the corn is done and I can use that ground. I’m also pondering on planting sunflowers some year and letting beans climb on them. Can’t decide if it would be too shady or not.
Still haven’t found any rattlesnake beans over my way. I did find some greasy beans, which are long also, and they tasted great. I’ve never had preacher beans so onto another hunt for them.
On a better note my produce man supposed to have some silver queen this week and that makes me happy!
I’m sure your mother enjoyed her beans. Matt is a wonderful son-in-law taking her tomatoes and peppers plus the beans. Tipper you’re so fortunate in having a good help mate! Have a bless day.
The pot of green beans in the picture looks just like my Mama’s. She always cooked them until they were so tender, and with bacon strips. She always canned the most beautiful quarts for winter. She and Dad moved to a little apartment in town a few years ago. Mama still misses her gardens. One afternoon, when she was missing “home”, she told me that she hopes God needs someone to tend the flower gardens in Heaven and he will give her that job when she gets there.
Nothing like a fresh mess of green beans!!!! I can still hear Mama saying “look those green beans over!”
Until I watched you I’d never heard of cooking beans any other way than barely hot and crunchy- slightly soft was considered overdone. Well, what a revelation!! I just love what my family calls my khaki beans!
Mmmmmm potatoes, green beans and bacon. Haven’t had this in years. Time to fix that!
Hope you. Folks are doing alright today.
I was so excited to see all the green beans y’all got on yesterday’s video. I know all of you were tickled pink. Have a blessed day and continued prayers for Granny ❤️
In my part of Appalachia some gardeners like Rattlesnake beans but most like the White half Runners variety.
Since I’m new to the BP.. I was wondering if you’ve done a video about quilts? Coverlets and quilts have been a necessity and expression of creativity throughout Appalachian history.
Robert-I haven’t done a video on quilts yet but hope to 🙂
We always cooked our beans until they were nearly mush with slices of bacon or ham. sometimes we added in some potatoes and it became almost the main course. I loved raw beans as well so I also like them steamed with butter but I do love the way we made them when I was young.
Tipper, old people like me need a way to correct typing mistakes here, it ok i guess God bless you friend, thank you for helping me with my green beans , i didn’t look at my comment before i pushed the button
Hey Norman, don’t feel bad, I had to rewrite my comment twice this morning by hitting the wrong button and deleting everything when trying to correct a mistake with my one typing finger. I will reread my comments and still miss left out words or mistakes. I just wish that would be the worse thing I will do the today, I’m old and sometimes think I am a mistake just waiting to happen.
Randy, all self-deprecating humor aside, you are not a “mistake waiting to happen.” Far from it. You are a man who has learned the value of humor, kindness and industry.
In another post today, you mentioned that you are recovering from from heat exhaustion. Please take extra care over the next few days to remain well-hydrated and cool. The fierce, unrelenting heat of Central Texas struck me down several years ago. Instead of paying attention, I foolishly ignored the warning signs of heat exhaustion (e.g. headache, nausea and weakness). I just kept working. I ended up with heat stroke which damaged, among other things, my heart. Please accept my testimony as a cautionary tale.
I appreciate your comment, I often look back on my life and think about how blessed I have been throughout my life with friends, I hope I have been as much of a blessing to them as they have been to me. I said this to say hopefully l haven’t always been a mistake when it comes to some things. I can pretty much git along with anyone, I just like some people better than others. One thing I have learned about getting along with people, is the problem is not always with them.
I know exactly what you are saying about heat exhaustion, heat exhaustion caused my daddy to have a heart attack in 1981. I thought I was ok Saturday and had been drinking water but when I stopped it hit me. I am feeling a lot better but have wasted today by talking so much on the phone to a lifelong best friend and then my sister in law, we stopped when the battery died. I have one more yard to cut that will take about 1 1/2 hrs and then if don’t start raining I will not have cut again for quite awhile. Beside my yard, I cut 3 yards for family members, it all adds up to about 6 acres. My son does the trim, I can no longer do this because of bad knees and disc in my back, riding the mower does not hurt me. I do this without getting paid, because I love all of them and it is just a way for me to help them because they are no longer able to cut their own grass. Shoot they pay me by putting up with me, two of them are my late wife’s sisters and have put up with me for around 51 years now.
That’s funny, Randy. I don’t know how many times I have rewritten a post that disappeared. Several. And no writer can say he or she mever nakes misteaks.
Something more to learn. Hopefully we will be as successful as you guys. So happy to hear Granny is well enough to can. It does take a lot of work and energy to can anything….even waterbathing. Looking forward to seeing what is next from the ‘Pig’. God Bless and I hope sending cards to Granny through you guys is ok. God Bless.
praise God for green beans, i got some from my uncle WC about 2 weeks ago, i don’t know what kind , but after cooking 3 hrs and some added bacon strips, yum yum God bless Granny I love you Granny ❤️✝️
This was the way my Grandma cooked her green beans, my mother, I and my son as well!!! And once the beans start cooking… they are NEVER stirred and cooked until all the liquid is gone! We also add butter with the meat. Some of the best eating….
You are absolutely right. Nothing says Appalachia like a pot of any kind of beans. Our problem was Mom’s family always cooked green beans to totally dry, and they were delicious. On the other had Dad’s Mom apparently had a lot of soup “soppy” in green beans and even cabbage. I think Dad finally gave up and said that a man always had to eat however a woman wants to cook the food. We always cooked the beans a long long time, but I now bring shame on my ancestors by sautéing green beans in olive oil. I know Granny will be so pleased with those green beans. After my Mom was in her nineties, her greatest pleasure was when I would bring a random bag of produce into her room to show her. She snapped all my beans and saved seed from tomatoes as long as she could use those hands that had been busy as far back as I could remember. We always believed in “putting up” everything possible for years that might be lean. I paid as much as $2.99 a pound for half runners recently that I used to grow to can and share with family.