I planned on posting this article in the Fall, when October Beans are in, but I thought maybe I could post it now and encourage people to give a tasty and beautiful kind of bean a try in their garden.
Harold’s Grocery has been a fixture of Sylva, North Carolina, for a long time. My wife’s parents used to frequent the place when she was a child, and Sarah has often spoke lovingly of the little metal horse machine out front that only cost a nickel a ride. I lived in Sylva/Cullowhee for a long time before I ever checked the place out, and it has that rarer and rarer small local grocery charm. What really won me over though, was the local produce. They know mountain people at Harold’s. When in season, you can expect to see real mountain cuisine: in spring there’s ramps, in summer preacher beans, and half-runners, huge ugly-but-delicious heirloom tomatoes, and in the fall: October Beans. With their beautiful red and yellow streaked hulls, october beans are decidedly eye-catching, and often their plump, not yet dry seeds are equally dappled with various reds, pinks, and other shades. The seeds can be so beautiful in fact, that I have seen where folks have drilled holes in them to make jewelry. (I don’t guess you’d want to get them wet.)
Now, in Western North Carolina, Greasy beans (pronounced “Greezy”) get all the press and high prices--and deservedly so! But, they aren’t the only delicious bean on the block. There’s a huge amount of bean diversity in the Appalachian range, and that is especially true in Western North Carolina. A veritable army of various types of “bunch” beans, cornfield beans, cut-shorts, pink tips, turkey craws, preacher beans, stick beans, case knife beans, butter beans, (to name only a few) can be found in gardens across the western part of the state. Many have been in the same families for generations.
October beans, like many of the beans I just listed, can come in a range of shapes, colors, and textures. It is more like a bean “genre” than a variety. The main unifying characteristic amongst October beans, or as some people call them, Fall Beans, is the fact that they set their beans late in the season. The first time I planted October beans, I was just about to give up on the flowerless giant sprawling vines, but then late in the season it started setting beans like crazy--I was inundated with them. Turns out, many types of October beans only set pods in the fall of the year, after days have begun to shorten. It’s not that they take a long time to put out pods, as much as they need to be “triggered’ by the days getting shorter. I planted October beans at different dates, but they all came in about the same time.
October beans, like many of the beans I just listed, can come in a range of shapes, colors, and textures. It is more like a bean “genre” than a variety. The main unifying characteristic amongst October beans, or as some people call them, Fall Beans, is the fact that they set their beans late in the season. The first time I planted October beans, I was just about to give up on the flowerless giant sprawling vines, but then late in the season it started setting beans like crazy--I was inundated with them. Turns out, many types of October beans only set pods in the fall of the year, after days have begun to shorten. It’s not that they take a long time to put out pods, as much as they need to be “triggered’ by the days getting shorter. I planted October beans at different dates, but they all came in about the same time.
I break down the October bean genre into two sub-genres: “tenderhull” and “toughhull.” Many varieties of october beans are stringless, and have a tough outer hull. Some tough-hulled types of october beans are commercially available as “French Horticulture Beans,” or “Cranberry Beans.” They are almost exclusively eaten as a dry bean, or in the desirable “shelly” phase when the bean seed is swollen and fully mature, but not yet dried out for dormancy. In Some Memories of Life on the Farm Before Tractors (2014), Roy L McKinney recalled the following story about local character Julius Twiggs and his shelly beans and bean dumplings:
Tenderhull beans on the other hand, tend to have more rounded seeds, and can be eaten at any stage: (1) Early and thin--some folks don’t give beans a chance to grow, (2) fat and bulging with seeds, flavor, and protein, (3) as shellies for soup beans and the like, (4) as dry beans, and (5) “unzipped,” strung together still in the hull, and dehydrated as “Leatherbritches,” a.k.a. “Shuckie Beans” or “Shuck Beans.*”
- Another story told to me by Lee, Veida and Aunt Nora was, It seemed the above mentioned folk had purchased a bushel of Julius best Shelly Beans. After the purchase was made Julius said, “I’m going to tell you folk about something good. Just make yourself some dumplings when you cook your beans. Wait till your beans are almost done, and just put your dumplings right in with your beans and let them cook until they are done. Now they are really good!” Veida said; “well Granny and I were crazy enough to try making bean dumplings just like Julius said and we ate a large bait of them.” A little later Julius learned of our dumpling feast and he went around about Bakersville telling folks “they may have me arrested; I told Nora and Veida how to make bean dumpling and they ate so much it almost killed them.” pg 41
Tenderhull beans on the other hand, tend to have more rounded seeds, and can be eaten at any stage: (1) Early and thin--some folks don’t give beans a chance to grow, (2) fat and bulging with seeds, flavor, and protein, (3) as shellies for soup beans and the like, (4) as dry beans, and (5) “unzipped,” strung together still in the hull, and dehydrated as “Leatherbritches,” a.k.a. “Shuckie Beans” or “Shuck Beans.*”
In other parts I’ve seen them referred to as “Millers” or “Moths.” It’s not hard to see where the name leather britches comes from, because the beans dry and fade to a shrivelled tan color that very much resembles leather pants. The dried beans are later soaked and then slow cooked with some fatback for a unique taste. In an article for the Sylva Herald, my friend and noted storyteller Gary Carden wrote a few lines in praise of the old-time treat:
- "[It’s] a bean dish that my grandmother used to fix from beans that had spent the fall drying out on newspapers in the attic. When she boiled them, they fattened up and acquired that wonderful flavor that drove me into a feeding frenzy. Cream corn, hot buttered cornbread and leather britches! Just thinking about it reduced me to a salivating fool. "
Shuck beans and October beans, Like so many other fixtures of mountain people’s gardens and supper tables, were adopted or inherited from the Cherokee and other Native groups. Before the widespread use of canning, and especially when grocery stores offered beans all-year-round, leather britches were an excellent way to store your beans through the winter. Overtime, whether they were threaded with a wire and hung on an old rusty nail, or spread out on an old window screen on a hot tin roof to dry, the shrunken tan hulls went from being a food staple to being a rare treat at holiday suppers (it does take, after all, a while to cook).
I remember seeing Leather britches hanging off porches, or occasionally inside an old car when I was growing up. At a roadside stand in Crossnore I actually saw some for sale a few years ago (which nearly caused me to wreck). On the whole though, I almost never see shuck beans or leather britches anymore. Now, that could be because people are drying them in electric dehydrators and keeping them sealed up in a freezer or somewhere out of sight and away from the amazing tight-rope gymnastic abilities of mice, but I think it has more to do with the fading memory of a way of life that didn't just find leather britches delicious--they needed a good way to keep food over the winter. My hope is that taste and novelty will, as it has with heirloom seeds, save the cultural practice of leather britches. There's a restaurant in Asheville called Buxton Hall BBQ, that has started offering leather britches on rare occasions. They even string them and dry them in house, in the smoke from the roasting hog meat. That sounds pretty 'daggum good to me.
If you are planning on planting out beans for Leather Britches, then not just any old kind of bean will do. I would only recommend “tender hull” type october beans for that and not the more common “tough hulled” type. Greasy beans, often cut-short (beans seeds are square-ish), are popular for shuck beans, as are “little white bunch beans.” Modern beans are too tough, so I’d stay away from those. Shoot, keep those blue lake beans and fortex things out of your garden anyway. What is the point of having a home garden if you just grow the same thing you can get at the store? Especially when there are thousands of bean varieties out there, and some of them becoming extinct because families no longer grow them in their own backyard. At the bottom of the page I will list some great sources for old timey mountain seeds, but first I want to say that if you live in a rural mountain part of NC, GA, VA, KY, WV, TN, etc. then don’t just go to a seed catalogue somewhere. Ask around your community: family, neighbors, teachers, preachers, extension agents, the guys down at the Feed and Seed, see if anybody knows where you can get a “double-handful” of some old timey local seed. It often helps if you have some good seed to trade (see links below) I’m not saying it will be easy, but I am saying it will be worth it!
- Bill Bests' Farm up in Berea, KY does great work preserving and sharing mountain seeds
- Alan West has a beautiful selection of old timey cornfield beans (and great rare and stunning field corn to grow it on.)