I was cooking up a pot of beans today and the thought occurred to me: Who the heck figured out how to cook these things? Especially since there are common varieties of beans that are somewhere between mildly toxic and very toxic when raw (kidney beans I’m lookin’ at you)
I realize that, given that humans eating beans predates written history, this may not have a super precise answer, but I’m wondering what led someone to take this tiny, hard, indigestible and potentially toxic seeds and try to cook them. From the raw state we usually soak and then boil then simmer for hours… who came up with that? Any idea at all?
They’re not all inedible raw. Presumably, someone started with the ones that are edible raw, then found that they were even better cooked, and then started trying to cook other sorts of beans.
But we don’t. From the raw state I eat green beans straight off the vine. Once they discovered cooking beans were just one more thing to try to cook. Dried beans came later.
Green beans and their kin are New World plants. I suppose that explains bean eating in the New World, but it doesn’t explain it in Europe, Asia, and Africa (although Africa has an unrelated species that can fill that niche, I don’t know how widespread it was thousands of years ago).
It’s not hard to imagine very hungry ‘people’ chewing on anything that offered sustenance. It’s well established that homo sapiens developed faster than the rest partly because they learned to cook stuff.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham has proposed cooking arose before 1.8 million years ago an invention of our evolutionary ancestors. If the custom emerged this early, it could explain a defining feature of our species: the increase in brain size that occurred around this time.
Depends when you visit the vine. With many species of beans, the dry, ripe pods persist on the vine for quite a while - so picking beans where nature has already done the drying is also possible.
Peas are native to Europe (and peas are just beans) - and for most of human history, they would have been eaten like beans (rehydrated/cooked from dry) rather than as the green garden peas that most commonly spring to mind when peas are mentioned.
Stewing makes spoilt meat much safer (kills bacteria, deactivates some toxins, dilutes unpalatable flavours, hides off odours,…) Boiling also softens dense hard/raw vegetal matter.
I’m sure it was common to cook and stew all sorts of wild game and foraged food on principle. Eating things raw was probably rarer then cooking it.
Whoever it was, it was most likely a group of women.
Grains and beans can both be picked with your hands and eaten while green, by the way. When I was a child I used to graze green wheat fields this way. Many dried grains are edible just soaked. And once you have a contained fire, it isn’t such a big step to wrap and cook food in coals.
Beans aren’t nearly as laborious to make edible as such things as acorns, which must be dried, ground, and tediously leached of toxins before cooking. They were the staple carbohydrate all along the western coast of North America for thousands of years, just for one place.
Modern westerners wrongly believe that before them, humans were starving and miserable all the time, and desperation prompted any new discoveries. But considering that our ancestors differed little from us, leisure time and curiosity seem to me much more likely. People are monkeys, and monkeys are intensely curious and experimental. Watch any animal at large; they are always tasting everything in the hopes of edibility. It is modernity that has stripped the curiosity about possible foods out of us.
In the older cultures that still exist, it’s extremely common that they enjoy a huge array of different foods compared to our attenuated palate.
Good point, and as i child i found that there’s a tiny bit at the growing base of a blade of grass that’s sweet and good to eat. I think funding that part of the thistle flower is delicious was inevitable.
I also think that “hmm, that’s bitter? Let’s try soaking it in water for a while.” was a standard strategy of our ancestors, from at least as early as the invention of cooking.
