Berea: Cradle of Hope, Greasy Beans & Garlic

"God has made of one blood all peoples of the Earth." Berea College motto

Berea, Kentucky represents the very best of the American dream - a reason to believe that your children will have more opportunities in life. It’s a college town like no other because Berea College has a mission like no other school.

It was founded in 1855 as America’s first inter racial and co-educational college. After blind prejudice outlawed interracial education during the first half of the 20th century, the mission expanded. Berea College charges no tuition and admits only academically promising students who have limited economic resources. All students work at least 10 hours per week in campus and service jobs while studying toward bachelor of arts or bachelor of science degrees.

The college is particularly renowned in two areas that appeal to us - sustainable agriculture and traditional American arts & music. Music and the arts are so ingrained here that for many years a feed and supply store in Berea (population in 2000 census was 9851) sold more Gibson guitars than any other outlet in the USA. I also suspect that Bereans eat more varieties of heirloom fruits and vegetables than people in any other town of comparable size.

I wouldn’t think of going to Berea without first booking a room at the recently remodled Boone Tavern. The college owns that century old hotel and uses it as a de facto hospitality and culinary school. An hour’s drive from Lexington’s airport, Boone Tavern has 58 guest rooms furnished with reproduction Early American furniture made by Berea College’s woodcraft school. After checking in and strolling around the campus and adjacent downtown, we headed out to meet a man who is reviving the “greasy bean” from near extinction.

Bill and the Bean Stock

Settlers in Appalachia brought their own bean stocks with them. Nearly every town and holler in eastern Kentucky and western Carolina had a bean with a different name and characteristics from those in the next town or holler. Mutated strains of these beans were passed on from generation to generation. Beans also migrated when daughters married sons from other hollers, where they cross married and became new beans.

After World War II, people in Appalachia began buying more commercial beans and growing fewer of these heirlooms. Berea College professor Bill Best realized a magnificent diversity was being lost in the rush to homogenous hybrid strains that were bred for shelf life and sisease resistance rather than for taste or character. He began collecting and preserving the traditional bean stock of the mountains and propagating their seeds through his Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center.

Bill Best also began collecting stories that went with the beans. He’s been saving them both for decades now, planting small crops to build up specific seed stock, which he sells on his web site. Wro and I found him walking his tomato fields in overalls, doing pretty much the same thing he’s been doing with his famous beans. Spring of 2007 was brutal for beans in the field, so Bill had more time for tomatoes, which are a money maker that helps subsidize his passion of saving beans. He walked us through wondrous variety including a tomato called Vinson Watts after a Kentucky grower who has been developing this tomato for 52 years. Bill thinks this pink tomato is the best tasting ever. I think he might be right.
“Atlanta restaurants offered to pay $6 a pound for my best heirloom tomatoes. That’s quite a bit more than I can get around here and it just might be worth the drive,” he confided.

What’s a Greasy Bean?

As we walked through tomato fields, Best mentioned that he spends three hours every night just answering e-mail from people desperate to find a particular greasy bean seed. Many of these people are transplanted Appalachians hoping to recall a taste of their childhoods. But an equal number are bean stock neophytes.

“Once people eat them, it seems that nothing else quite satisfies,” Bill said.

He pleases a lot of people because he has more than 200 Appalachian beans in a collection which grows every day. Wro asked Bill how greasy beans got their name.

“Greasy bean pods lack the fine hairs of other beans and so they appear greasy,“ he explained.

Best believes that greasy beans originated with the Cherokee and reached their zenith in western North Carolina and eastern Kentucky. His theory is contentious. Academics have weighed in on this subject from multiple disciplines. A little internet research turned up greasy bean origin theories based on ethno-botany, anthropology, archeology, population dynamics, migration patterns, horticultural fashion and pre-Columbian trade routes.

Bill told us that his opinion about Cherokee origins stems from the geographical location of the primary stocks in Carolina and Kentucky.
“The Cherokee influence on gardening in Western North Carolina is well known. Less well known is the fact that many people living in Southeastern Kentucky have a lot of Cherokee blood. I know I could be wrong about the Cherokee origin but most of my greasy beans come from Madison, Buncombe, and Haywood counties in North Carolina and Jackson and Owsley counties in Eastern Kentucky. I have a few from other Kentucky and North Carolina counties and one from Northern Georgia. It is astounding to me how many varieties of greasy beans are from Madison County, North Carolina alone. I'm from Haywood County and I have three very different greasy beans which are from within a few miles of each other,” he said.

Bill’s project is multi-generational. His grandson was working with him when we visited and Bill seemed pleased when we told him that he spoke of the work with great enthusiasm.

“Really, he said that? I try to not put any pressure on him at all,“ he said, smiling. Bill added that his project is a verification of his mother’s intuition.

“Mother was far ahead of her time. She felt intuitively that the new beans being released by the experiment stations and seed companies, the beans which had been "improved" by breeders, were bland and tough and flavorless compared to the beans which had been passed down in the mountains for generations,” he explained.

All Bill’s beans are picked when the pods are full with immature beans, before fiber sets in. He compared stringing beans to meditation:
“Start at the tail end of the bean, snap off the end and then pull the string along the inner curve of the bean. Then snap the stem end and pull the string from the outer edge. Pull off any left over bits of string as you snap the beans (into one inch pieces) about so,” he demonstrated.

He explained that “greasies” can be cooked whole like other green beans, harvested as “shellies” (nearly mature beans with prominent green seeds) or allowed to mature into dry beans that are removed from their pods before cooking.

“Where I grew up, we dried whole green beans into ‘leather britches.’ Then we could enjoy them throughout the winter. People used to string up green beans to dry using a needle and heavy thread,” Best said, adding he now prefers drying beans on a screen for several days. Once the beans are dry as leather, he stores them in the freezer.

Before we left, he drew a wider analogy about the new interest in heirloom foods.

“I think heirloom values in general are making a comeback for similar reasons. Mainstream values, those brought into the mountains by northeastern industrialists and missionaries, have turned out to be bland and tough, but leave much to be desired on a human level. Our old traditional values - like honesty, trust and neighborly compassion - might be good antidotes for cynical, impersonal times,” he said, professorily.
In a normal year, Bill Best sells greasy beans at farmers’ markets in Lexington and Berea. But last year’s weather reduced him to preserving seed stock. So Wro and I left full of greasy bean knowledge but with tummies empty of greasy beans. We hoped to find some before our weekend was over and decided to begin our quest with dinner at Kentucky’s most historic traditional restaurant.

Blue Moon Farm

We drove into the hills outside Berea to visit a couple who believe in garlic the way Bill Best believes in beans. Leo Keene and Jean Pitches Keene grow some of the best heirloom garlic in America - their client list includes some famous chefs. We had been told that their Blue Moon Farm was “rather remote,” but after getting lost three or four times and passing some steep hillside goat pastures, we decided that description needed an upgrade. Fortunately for garlic shoppers, Blue Moon Farm also has a website.
Leo and Jean built this farm because they were picky eaters. Well, Leo was.

“When Jean joined me here in 1982, we had a camper by the river. It didn’t take her long to realize that I would never leave home if I couldn’t take food with me, because it had become so hard to find good food. Being unable to find good garlic is what drove us to this.” Leo explained, while braiding garlic for the Lexington Farmers Market.

We tasted three kinds of garlic with distinctly different textures, colors and flavors. Then Leo informed us that according to Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) genetic scientists, all three were all the exact same garlic.

“After DNA tests and whatever, the USDA is convinced that there are only ten kinds of garlic, with some subtle geographic variations. I don’t want to argue with genetic science but I grow two totally different tasting varieties that they insist are the same thing - German White and Music.

The first caramelizes much faster too. So it has to have more sugar. The German White doesn’t grow nearly as well in this climate either,” he explained with a wry smile.

Of the nearly twenty varieties that Blue Moon sells, Music garlic (named after Canadian garlic pioneer Al Music) is their best seller because it has huge cloves which make life easier on chefs. Their Lorz Italian is the most lovely, an “artichoke type” garlic that is layered on the inside, yet has few interior cloves.

We learned some important garlic trivia: that a hickory smoker is marvelous for drying garlic; that all garlic’s bad attributes stem from having set too long in storage; and that garlic cloves make a marvelous substitute for olives in a martini.

Recipes

Bill on Beans:

Bill Best advises soaking dried beans overnight, followed by two more fresh-water soaks in the morning.

“After that soaking, the beans are ready to be cooked as if they were fresh beans.”

Blue Moon Farm’s Green Garlic Soup

Serves 2

3 cups chicken stock
6-8 stalks green garlic
2 tbsp butter
3 small white potatoes
3 tbsp white wine vinegar
Salt and pepper

Take 2 green garlic and cut the shoots into thin rounds. Saute the green garlic rounds in 2 butter for about 10 minutes over a low flame. Wash 3 small white potatoes and cut them into pieces (do not peel). Place the potatoes and sauteed green garlic in a sauce pan and add 3 cups of chicken broth.

Cook covered for about 30 minutes.

In small batches in your blender, puree the soup until it is smooth like velvet.

Return to the saucepan and add more broth if it is too thick. Add salt and pepper to taste and reheat.

When hot, add vinegar and serve.

Cyd Mull's Tempura Beans with Horseradish Sauce

1 pound washed cleaned Green Beans
2 cups of All Purpose Flour
1 cup of Corn Starch
5 teaspoons Baking Powder
1 Table spoon Curry Powder
2 11.15 fluid ounces Perrier Mineral Water
1 teaspoon Celtic Sea Salt
Fresh Cracked Pepper
½ cup Grated Pecorino Romano Cheese
2-3 liters of peanut oil
Tempura batter- mix together flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and curry powder in a bowl. Dredge the beans in this dry mix, shaking any excess back into the bowl, and add the mineral water while whisking constantly to make it into batter.
Season the batter with Celtic sea salt and cracked pepper.
Heat peanut oil to 375 degrees F in a deep-fryer, or according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Dip the dusted green bean into the tempura batter. Gently drop the green beans into the hot peanut oil. With long tongs roll green beans over until the batter is a golden color. Remove from hot oil and place on a paper towel. While tempura green beans are warm dust with grated Pecorino Romano cheese.

Serve with Horseradish Sauce on the side.

Horseradish Sauce

1 cup Mayo
1 cup Sour Cream
3 Tablespoons Horseradish Grated
Sea Salt
Mix together ingredients

Recipe by from Cyd’s Catering L.L.C.
http://www.cateringbycyd.com/

If You Go…

Southern & Eastern Kentucky Tourism Development Association
Center for Rural Development
2292 South Highway 27
Somerset, KY 42501
877-TOURSEKY

http://www.tourseky.com/

Berea Tourist and Convention Commission
3 Artist Circle
Berea, KY 40403
800-598-5263
http://www.berea.com/

Boone Tavern Hotel and Restaurant

Berea, KY 40404, 800-366-9358

Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center1033 Pilot Knob Cemetery RoadBerea, KY 40403859- 986-3204
http://www.heirlooms.org/

Blue Moon Farm 3584 Poosey Ridge Road Richmond, KY 40475
http://www.bluemoongarlic.com/