Leather Britches green beans

[Mary]

I was reading about the early american settlers using a drying method for green beans.Before people had refrigeration, food was preserved by either drying or storing it in a root cellar.By drying whole green beans into leather britches,people could enjoy them throughout the winter.Bill Best says they are exceptionally good.People used to string up green beans to dry using a needle and heavy thread, though Best prefers to dry the beans on a screen for several days. Once the beans are dry as leather, he stores the dried beans in the freezer.Leather Britches need to soaked before cooking, Best likes to soak his over night,draining off the water,followed by two more fresh-water soaks in the morning, after soaking the beans they are ready to be cooked as if they were fresh beans.Does anyone dry their whole beans? I'm thinking of drying some, I have a large freezer. :D

[johno]

Never heard of that, but it makes sense. If I remember to, I'll definitely try it this year!

[Gary]

Some time ago I posted information about Leather Britches Beans. I don't remember which Thread it was on as there doesn't seem to be a common Thread for recipes and such. This is an interesting article
Gary

Shucky Beans' or Leather Britches
The harvest is yet a way off and so I suppose it is all the more fitting to talk about preserving it long before it gets here. This applies as well to purchased food gotten at any time.

There are five ways of preserving food that I want to address:

1. Canning
2. Freezing
3. Drying
4. Salting
5. Pickling/fermenting

Which one is better? That, of course, is a useless question. Each gives different results. This can be illustrated by contrasting the first two which are the most common ways of preserving food at home.

We can can or freeze, let's say, green beans. Which would be more like fresh beans? Ha! It's a trick question. Pressure can some green beans and a the same time freeze some. A week later prepare them both and the frozen ones will be much more like freshly cooked green beans than the canned ones. But six months later, the canned ones will be much more like fresh than the frozen ones. Not actually resembling fresh beans, but still much more like fresh than the frozen ones.

Canning modifies food more than does freezing. Not only are the bacteria and fungi killed, buy the enzymes are inactivated. Once it is properly canned, the food will modify no more for decades. Canned food done 30 years ago is virtually indistinguishable from that canned last year. Freezing food antenuates and slows down the bacteria, fungi, and enzymes but does not destroy them. They keep working on the food even at subzero temps and after time the food loses a great deal of its quality. Blanching or cooking the food before freezing slows this process but it doesn't stop it.

So to preserve the best quality of the food for the short term or for food to delicate to withstand the heat and pressure of canning, freezing is better. For a strategic stash of food and for food to fill in the 'hungry gap' and tide you over from year to year, canning is better.

To abandon other methods of food preservation in favor of one 'best' method is to have you food management inflexible and more vulnerable.

Canned food lasts a very long time, a hundred years at least. Best, of course, to rotate one's stock but a larder full of canned goods will tide you over the worst of times, be that a personal or common worst of times. True, some food value is lost in the over-cooking of it, but not much. Obviously then food that will withstand a lot of cooking are the ones that can the best: meats, soups, sauces, and the tougher vegetables such as beans, corn, carrots, etc. Canned broccoli doesn't work too well. The heat and pressure required to preserve it will render it to mush.

The largest drawback to frozen food is that, unlike all the other methods mentioned, it requires a continuous input of energy in order to maintain it in its preserved state. Still, it's energy well spent. We freeze most vegetables without blanching them. In the case of green shell beans, berries, pearl onions, etc. we freeze them on cookie sheets and when they are frozen like gravel, we put them in bags. That way the cook can take out what is required without disturbing hte remainder. In hte case of broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, carrots (only very small ones), and such we freeze them as before and then dip them into very slightly salted water to from a glaze and refreeze them. After several layers of glaze they are packed into bags and frozen. Some meat and fish are frozen as well. We also keep strategic butter and cheese in the freezers.

If you have the freezer space, you can freeze tomatoes whole, just as you pick them. Then after the season, dip the frozen tomato in warm water to loosen the skin and remove it. Place the skinned tomato in a colander with a bowl beneath. When the tomato has thawed, you will have a colander full of tomato paste and some excellent stock in the bowl.

Dehydrating will perserve food far longer than freezing but not so long as canning. Bacterial, fungal, and enzymatic action are suspended in the absence of water. Reconstituted dried food is not like the fresh counterpart. You can make an excellent apple pie from dehydrated apples, it just isn't the same thing as a pie made from fresh apples. For cooking, there's hardly any difference. Dried sweet corn, tomatoes, carrots, peppers, onions, shallots, and the like in soup are almost indistinguishable from fresh.

You might be surprised how little salt it takes to perserve food. Concerns (over exagerated IMO) about sodium consuption can be mitigated by soaking the food in water to remove the salt before cooking it. Salted meat will keep for more than a year without refrigeration. We generally freeze it after it has salt cured to extend it even longer, but if the freezers or their electricity were to fail, the meat would be fine for months stil. A lot of vegetables can be salted as well, green beans, carrots, cabbage, and such.

Fermenting and pickling are not the same thing, although the mechanism of preserving the food is the same. The acidity is raised to the point that the spoilage organisms go into suspension. In the case of pickling this is rise in acidity is brought about by adding acid to the food, ususlly vinegar. In the case of fermented food bacteria are allowed to 'work' the food until they produce enough acid, usually lactic acid, to preserve it. Pickled and fermented foods also last a very long time and in many cases more nutrients are available than from the fresh food.

Many times, perhaps most times, some combination of the above methods gives the best resluts. As I mentioned, we freeze meat after we have slated it. Food that is slighly acidic will preserve by dehydration longer and by less heat and pressure by canning. Dehydrated food will last longer if it is frozen or heat sealed in jars.

Each method of perservation has its uses and yields its specific resluts. The photo above is a plate of dehydrated green beans, an Applachian staple for generations. The food is known as 'shucky beans' or 'leather britches'. Leather britches do not resemble fresh green beans, canned or frozen green beans. They are a food in their own right. Flexibility in preservation provides a lot of such foods.
Eleutheros
Location:Southern Appalachia
www.motherearthnews.com/Organic_Gardening/2006_August_September/Discover_Real_Green_Beans

[Gary]

Shucky Beans or Leather Britches
Yes, those are the same shuck beans that are in the title of my first book, and they are also known as Leather Britches, I assume because the dried pod of the bean looks like the tanned-leather pants of early pioneers. I'm sure that the folks who lived next to you weren't simply from Tennessee, but specifically from the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee... or at least those mountains, at the southern end, are where the family hailed from. Shuck Beans are known only to folks from that area or with those roots and, as near as I can tell, not made anywhere else in the U.S. I always thought they were a combination of Cherokee drying traditions and "European" green beans, but discovered while researching my last book that they actually were made in Germany many centuries ago (getrocken bohne -- with some umlauts I don't know how to find on my word processor).

To make them, you can use any green bean that gets a nice, meaty seed in it; but what we preferred in the mountains is a white half-runner (or mountain half-runner) bean. The seeds for these are available at plenty of seed stores, but if you can't find them, contact Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, P.O. Box 170, Earlysville, VA 22936. Some folks also use Kentucky Wonder; or another pole bean would do.

Let the beans mature so the seeds are plump in the pod, but you don't want them to get so old that the pods are tough. You've seen the beans your friends from Tennessee picked, so you'll know when they're ready. The farm markets and produce stands here have lots of half-runner beans, so I just buy mine instead of raising them. You can do that, too. Again, look for a bean with a fresh, green, tender pod but fully formed beans inside.

One nice thing if you grow the beans yourself, you don't have to worry about pesticides or any chemicals on them, and when you get ready to "sew" them, you don't have to rinse and dry them first. But if you're buying them, you'll want to do that, time consuming though it is to towel dry the beans. Otherwise, if you string them up damp, they will rot.

You know what to do from there: break the ends gently and pull the strings off the beans (beans with strings really do taste better than the stringless varieties you find) and "sew" them onto sturdy lengths of thread. My aunt said never to run your needle through the bean itself or you'd never get the string out later, only sew through the pod. Hand them to dry in a place that's not humid. There's two camps to whether or not it should be a sunny spot, but I've dried in sun and shade and both are fine as long as the beans don't get damp. When they're good and dry (several days-weeks depending on the humidity where you are)

We used to store them in cleaned-up coffee cans with plastic lids or even paper bags. A lot of my cousins now put the dried beans in tight-sealing freezer bags in the freezer just to be sure they don't get infested with any bugs.

When you're ready to cook, you rinse them really well and set them in water to soak overnight, then simmer slow on the back of the stove with a piece of white bacon for seasoning for a few hours. Add salt when the beans are tender, not before and serve with cornbread.

You are absolutely right that the whole stringing/sewing ritual needs to take place on the front porch and must be accompanied by big glasses of iced tea. And it's so wonderful that you want to share this tradition with your children. My daughter loves her shuck beans, too!
Ronni Lundy
www.recipelink.com/msgbrd/board_33/1999/JUL/47.html

Instructions for drying Shucky Beans

String very full beans as you would for cooking, but do not break them.
Thread beans on twine, using just enough beans on each string for one or
two meals. Then drop them into a brine of ½ cup coarse salt and one gallon
of water for 15 minutes. Drain on newspaper. The brine will keep bugs
away from your beans. Hang the strings of beans on wire or rope in a dry
place for at least three weeks. Make sure they are completely dry or they
will mold.

Source: “Mountain Measures” -- Junior League of Charleston, WV
ed. 1974

Cooking Shucky/Leather Beans
Green Beans
Salt And Pepper
Lard Or Bacon Grease
Water
Prior to cooking the dried beans, pour lots of boiling water over the beans
and soak overnight. In the morning, wash the beans well and cover with
water in a pan. Cook for 2 hours; then add salt, lard or bacon grease, and
pepper. Finish cooking about 2 hours more, adding water as needed.
(You may want to season in a Heart/Healthy way)

[Mary]

Thanks Gary,very informative, I just tried to make my post as short as possible.Didn't know you or anyone else had already post about the beans.I can and I will try the drying method, probably do both,canning is a lot of work.

[Brenda]

Oooooo! I have never heard of this. I cannot wait to try this. All my life we have canned most of our veggies in jars. I love to can, and I even cook up big pots of soup and chili and beans and stuff to can. I also to meat and stock or gravy. I have never had a problem with any of these things, and they will last forever. I am planting the Italian tomato for sun drying this spring, and I am going to try my hand at drying my own tomatoes. I always put some in jars, but am excited about trying the sun drying. I look forward to trying the pole beans (I am planting Kentucky Wonder). I love green snap beans, and usually can a alot of them in jars.

[ceresone]

I must be dense, what book, Gary? and where do I get it? if everyone already knows, and i dont, lol--i'll feel like a dunce. this is such good information, and i'd love to have a book giving all this, and i'm assuming much more.

[Gary]

Ronni Lundi wrote how her family's gathering around their kitchen table fostered her sense of identity:

It was around that table that I learned the lessons of my life, the stories that told me who I was and where I came from, the stories that led me to imagine where I might go... I took those stories in greedily, hungrily, and was nourished on them like they were a glass of cold sweet milk and a wedge of my mother's golden steaming fresh cornbread.
Ronni Lundy, “The Tao of Cornbread,” in L. Elisabeth Beatt ie, ed., Savory Memories (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1998), 66.


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[longhunter1769]

my mom always used sulfur beans for makeing leather breeches

[ovenbird]

I was reading about the early american settlers using a drying method for green beans.Before people had refrigeration, food was preserved by either drying or storing it in a root cellar.By drying whole green beans into leather britches,people could enjoy them throughout the winter.Bill Best says they are exceptionally good.People used to string up green beans to dry using a needle and heavy thread, though Best prefers to dry the beans on a screen for several days. Once the beans are dry as leather, he stores the dried beans in the freezer.Leather Britches need to soaked before cooking, Best likes to soak his over night,draining off the water,followed by two more fresh-water soaks in the morning, after soaking the beans they are ready to be cooked as if they were fresh beans.Does anyone dry their whole beans? I'm thinking of drying some, I have a large freezer. :D

Don't you lose some nutrients with all of this soaking and water changing? What is the purpose of this? If it is to control microbes, might soaking the beans in water in the fridge be better?

[hillbilly4]

I always helped my mother in West Virginia prepare green beans by stringing, then placing them on screen windows to dry in the sun. Sometimes we would use the space behind the back seat under the back window of our car. But, we would never, ever cook the 1st batch of leather britches until after the first snow fall of the year.

[TastyofHasty]

How did you cook them? In one, or more(?) changes of water?

BTW, welcome, hillbilly4!