I am a southern boy, deep-rooted in rich Appalachian green bean tradition and proud of it. I love green beans. All of them. I love them year round, especially this time of year. There is nothing better than green beans from the garden and in the South, home-grown green beans are a sacred ritual.

The different varieties of green beans are one thing, and I will talk about that in a minute, but knowing how to cook green beans is the secret. Here in Appalachia, our women folk, and probably even some men folk, know more about how to break, can and cool green beans than any other place in the world.

Appalachian women know beans and when you know your bean, you know your cooking method.

The ritual of ‘stringing and snapping’ those beans is yoga for our souls. How to cook green beans is not a secret, because wherever two or more of us green bean eaters are gathered together, we love to reminisce about how fresh beans were a mainstay of our summer meals, and of the work it took to prepare the prodigious amounts we grew in our gardens and bought at our farmsteads. We meet at church dinners and family reunions and talk about how we circle up our lawn chairs after supper, in the shank of a summer evening as the humid air relented a bit, and broke beans.

We talk about how we sat alongside our grandparents and cousins with unfolded sections of the newspaper spread like drop cloths at our feet to catch the curls of pulled strings and the occasional spent hull when a pod was so full that it burst when bent. That is how I grew up.

If you were raised in the South, it is also how you grew up. It’s not only how we used to do it, it is how we still do it.

Just how many different varieties of green beans are there? The answer is, over a hundred. Probably well over a hundred. There’s the Greasy Back, Greasy Green Hull, Greasy Grits, Greasy Fatback, the Volunteer White Half Runners, Duran Striped Half Runner, NT Half Runner, State Half Runner and Mountaineer White Half Runner. There’s the Old Time Kentucky Heirloom, Old Time Golden Stick and Old Joe Clark. There’s the Granny’s Shuck Bean, Juanita Smith, Blue Ribbon, Rattlesnake, Mayflower, Case Knife and the Tennessee White Case Knife. Speaking of states, there’s the Tennessee Cornfield Bean, South Carolina, North Carolina Long Greasy Stick Bean, Kentucky Brown Greasy, Kentucky Wonder and Missouri Wonder. There’s the Red Stick, Brown Stick, Tennessee Brown, Dorie Smith Brown, and don’t forget the Mountain Pole and the Red Valentine Pole.

I don’t know how many different varieties of green beans I have eaten in my life. I guess it is more than a few.

My all time favorite green bean is the old fashioned red green beans. There could be another name for it. Generally, it is that or half-runners, which is overall the most popular variety of green beans today.

Berea, Kentucky farmer Bill Best, president of the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center in Berea has dedicated decades to collecting, cultivating, and promoting heirloom beans. He is an ardent seed saver who specializes in heirloom tomato and bean varieties.

If you want to know more from a real expert, visit Bill Best’s articles or find his book, Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste: Heirloom Seed Savers in Appalachia.

In Saving Seeds, Preserving Taste, Best’s new book, he challenges us to think of seed savers as more than just eccentrics and oddballs. Instead, he says, we should regard them as necessary protectors, defenders, and democratizers of our food supply.

Best keeps almost 700 varieties of heirloom bean seeds at the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, which is at his farm in the Knobs country of Madison County, Kentucky, just outside of Berea.

But it’s not just beans Best is preserving. He’s also continuing a way of life Appalachian farmers have handed down for generations: cultivating an appreciation for the tenderness and fresh flavor of favorite home-grown fruits and vegetables, teaching the process of producing and saving seeds from one season to plant in the next, and engaging the support of a like-minded community.

You might recognize him as a long-time grower of ripe, juicy heirloom tomatoes, which he sells at farmers’ markets in Lexington and Berea. Best sells his bean seed at Heirlooms.org, if which he is president. He has customers, not only from the United States, but around the world, including New Zealand, Australia, England, France and Ukraine.

There is one heirloom variety of green bean that has had my heart ever since my grandmother, Dimple Speck, cooked them when I was a child.

That heirloom variety is called Partridge Head, although around here we say “Paterge” head or “Patterched.”

The Partridge Head bean gets its name from the seed coat patterns resembling the markings on a partridge’s head. A couple of years ago, I researched Partridge Head green beans and was surprised to learn that this heirloom variety of bean comes from Pickett County, Tennessee and Clinton County, Kentucky, and has been here since the early 1800’s.

That is amazing!

We should try to capitalize on being the “Partridge Head Green Bean Capital of the World!” That does my heart good. It is something to brag about!

Bill Best was recently quoted as saying, “Beans were woven into the fabric of everything we did as a family and community.” Where I’m from, it’s still that way.

Randy Speck

Randy Speck writes on his blog, The Notorious Meddler, at randyspecktacular.com. He is a 40+ year radio broadcaster and is presently on the air at WFLW-AM in Monticello, Kentucky and at WKYR-FM in Burkesville, Kentucky.

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