Oh, how I wish I had a vegetable garden! I would try my hand at growing everything.
Gene, my good friend and neighbor, has a flourishing vegetable garden this year. On occasion, he lets me come down and dig around to get my fix. Along with tomatoes, zucchini and beets, he has beautiful bush beans and a few days ago I was lucky enough to get some of his first beans.
What a treat!
I’m far from alone in enjoying green beans. Green beans are the most popular edible pod bean in the United States.
Green beans originated in South America–probably Peru– thousands of years ago and their cultivation was spread to other parts of South America and northward by migrating Indian tribes. When the Europeans arrived in the Americas, green beans became part of the great Columbian Exchange. (You remember the Columbian Exchange from your history classes. America got, among other things, coffee beans, bananas, olives and onions. Europe, Asia and Africa got potatoes, tomatoes, vanilla and beans.)
In the European part of that exchange, the cultivation of the beans quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean region with the new crop becoming particularly popular in Greece, Turkey and Italy. Here is a 1543 European woodcut of a man ravenously-consuming green beans from the Americas–either that or he is shouting at the beans. Can’t tell.
So, this recipe, with its feta and mint, is a tip of the hat to that early Mediterranean love affair with the bean.
But first, a bit of food chemistry… This month, in their July-August issue, Cooks Illustrated Magazine ran a piece about cooking green beans. (They also featured the original version of this recipe.) Their article drew upon the writings of food expert Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of The Kitchen). Seems that the magic in cooking tender vibrantly-green green beans is cooking them quickly in very salty water. Accoding to Cooks Illustrated (quoting McGee), “when vegetables are cooked in salted water, sodium ions displace some of the calcium ions in their cell walls…causing the vegetable to soften.”
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This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. Here is the link: Green Bean Salad With Cherry Tomatoes and Feta.
