Putting By

Sep 11

story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder

Putting by, setting aside, laying back – so many ways to describe the act of prolonging the lifespan of food. We thought of this recently as we pondered late summer flavors that we wanted to savor again when the holidays come around.

We so often face the binary of fresh yet perishable food vs. shelf-stable products of indeterminate origin and indefinite mortality that it’s easy to forget there’s a third way. A way that could involve steamy afternoons with a canning kettle and sterilized jars; but that could also be as simple as stringing green beans on thread before hanging them up to dry.

Or laying them out in a car under a hot summer sun. It’s bean season. One of the greatest things I've ever seen was trays of beans set on the dashboard and back window of a nice BMW to make shuck beans.

That social media post by Sheila Mann a few years back triggered a flurry of responses, including this one from a woman who shared her own shuck bean memory –

I grew up in a funeral home. When my Grandmother P. fixed a mess of beans to dry out, she spread out white sheets on top of the funeral home garage. She sent me out on the roof to check the beans and all I could think of was, I hope she didn’t get that sheet out of the embalming room. Daddy will be so pissed off if she did. I wasn’t worried that the sheet might have covered a body at some point. I just knew my dad was going to be mad.

Not having spare sheets or a funeral home garage roof, or even a nice BMW, we decided to go the string route and visited Sheila for a hands-on demo. We supplied five pounds of white half-runners from Morgan Rae Farms in Shelby County, a spool of heavy waxed thread, and several sturdy needles. Sheila supplied newspaper and color commentary.

And the tutorial began.

There are two schools of thought. I subscribe to the break-them-in-half and break-off-both-tips one because otherwise when you cook them, if you cook a whole bean, it's more difficult. But that was a very traditional way.

Now the thought to leaving the tip on, somebody told me, was that it kept mold and rot from setting in. Well, but we're drying them more hygienically. We're not drying them in the barn, and we're not drying with variations in moisture. So I don't think that’s necessary; I always take the tips off.

And now Donna's gonna show us her embroidery skills. Let’s get some scissors and cut off about three feet. Then tie you a big knot. So you got half a bean. Punch it right through the middle. Down the string it goes to the knot. Wash, rinse, repeat.

As we snapped and strung, and the beans went into the big metal bowl – clink, clink, clink – Sheila kept us in another kind of stitches with stories about bean stringing parties from the past, which ideally took place on someone’s large, commodious back porch.

I mean, that is the ultimate. You drink a little bit. You talk to the old women. They make fun of their husbands. They give you some tips about sex and housekeeping. It’s heaven! My last bean stringing party was about five years ago. We were in Salyersville on my cousin's back porch.

There were four or five of us girls sitting around. And she brought out the bourbon, and we strung and we strung and we laughed.

We asked Sheila about canning vs. drying, and what other foods, in addition to beans, might have been dried. She remembers her grandmother drying both beans and apples and pointed out that absent a refrigerator, folks had to turn to other means of storing foodstuffs.

Drying was just a traditional foodway. It’s not exactly novel, and there’s nothing much exotic about it, but it was a wonderful way of doing things.

Back in the 1980s, Sheila traveled to some pretty isolated areas in Eastern Kentucky as part of her work talking to landowners about oil and gas leases.

I got to go to all these hollers. And I got to talk to these wonderful people and they were still doing traditional foods. And that's where I saw the squash. They would slice it in rounds and string it to dry. And then they would reconstitute it in the winter in soups and stews and sometimes they would make puddings. So that was an interesting dried food.

And she enumerated the complexities of canning, especially if done over an open fire. Buying or saving the canning jars, keeping the fire going for eight hours, tending the kettle, wrapping the jars in rags. A nightmare, as she put it.

Sheila answered the question of the difference between shuck beans and leather britches. None, it just depended on where you grew up. Ran down a list of heirloom beans – cutshort, greasy, turkey craw, rattlesnake, big John. Then ran to her freezer and came back with an envelope of greasy bean seeds for our garden at Holly Hill Inn.

We learned that shuck beans got their name because they’re dry as corn shucks when they’re ready. As Sheila described them – so dry, they would be like tissue, and they would be as dry as a corn shuck. And rather pale brown.

Sheila saves her shuck beans for the holidays. Mine will come out on Thanksgiving and Christmas. They are an acquired taste. I think they’re delicious however.

Per Sheila’s instructions, we’ll leave our beans hanging for several days until they reach the desired state of weightlessness. Then we’ll strip them off their strings and place them in freezer bags, to be retrieved and rehydrated and slow-cooked for the Thanksgiving table.

Sheila’s father was a circuit judge and her uncles took turns at county attorney, and once she was old enough she liked to campaign, knocking on peoples’ doors and talking to them and learning what was what.

I was always enchanted to go into these real poor but well-kept homes. And whatever little dab of food was left from breakfast or lunch would be on a saucer on the warming stove. A biscuit, half a piece of sausage. They were so careful to husband what they had. And so thrifty and it was such good food.

And that’s how we left – with that lovely benediction to grace and economy and lives well-lived, and lessons worth learning.

Putting By

Related Content

Apple Stack Cake

Putting By

Related Content

Apple Stack Cake

Apple Stack Cake

Our Daily Bread