Shuck Beans - Leather Britches - The Bean of Appalachia!!

 

When I was a kid we ate dried beans all the time. Mom’s mother, a.k.a. Granny, bought pinto beans in 50 pound sacks. They were the staple, along with corn bread, that saved the lives of plenty of Appalachian Children. Moms dad was killed when she was just 4 years old. So Granny did the best she could with two children in the 1930’s without a society safety net. She owned her own place and raised as much of their own food a possible on a little ½ acre homestead. Like the pioneers of old they ate much of the same thing day in and day out with beans and taters today and taters and beans tomorrow.

 Mom said it was rough grub but there was always plenty of it. Meat was reserved for Sunday diner. Salt pork or canned meat like pork or the occasional canned beef could be on the menu or whatever came out of the smokehouse. But most Sunday dinners consisted of chicken, killed that morning, either fried or made with flour dumplings and some sort of green bean and a tater or two. In the summer the beans were green and picked right out of the garden. In the winter the beans were either home canned or were dried green beans that were affectionately called “Shuck Beans.”

Now storing food was a dilemma in Appalachia in the 1930’s. Electricity was not present in many houses. The well to do had electricity long before most mountaineers. By 1942 about 17% of Harlan County had electricity. Many of the mines had electric lines run to them but many were still shooting coal on solid and hand loading with carbide lights. Granny got electricity in the early fifties. I still remember her little 4 fuse screw in fuse box on the side of her house. She had electricity for lights, and got her first refrigerator in the early 1960’s.  The big deal was that she got a jacket for her warm morning stove in the late 50’s and it had an electric fan that moved the hot air around the room and made the room so much warmer and the stove so much more efficient.

By 1950 mom was already married to her first husband at 16 years old and keeping a house of her own. They neither had electricity nor a refrigerator. So raising enough food was a necessity for survival. In the 1930’s Granny canned on an open fire using a dishpan. She placed rags between the jars to keep them from clanging together. She canned potatoes, beans, corn, tomatoes, jelly, jams of all kinds, pickles both dill and sweet, and meat whenever she had it. There were not all the freezers. Every homestead had a smokehouse. In November it was hog killing season and smoking season. They depended on the hogs being fat and not the lean pigs of today. It was so important to get the 45 to 50 pounds of lard every fall. This was what you were going to cook with all year. You didn’t go to the store and buy vegetable oil. You had lard.

After all that was done then there were the things you would dry. I remember mom talking about sulphuring apples. Granny had a wooden cask and she would put apples in it. Late season apples that usually kept well but I do not know the exact variety. She would place the apples in the cask and would set a board in and a lid from an old jar. Then she would place a lump of sulphur or sulphur powder on the lid and ignite it and then put the cask lid back on. The sulphur would burn and smoke and this killed any bacteria or bug eggs on the apples surface and helped them to keep longer. They also would dry apples. Granny had a large flat rock that she would build a little fire under it and cut apples and lay on top. The rock would not get hot but very warm and the apples would dry rather quickly in the sun.

There were other vegetables that they dried. They dried berries, herbs, flowers, beans, and other stuff that they wanted to use through the winter. The most prized of all were the beans. Now we grew several varieties of beans. Most of the varieties I grow today are varieties that I grew as a kid and mom or dad grew as children as well as their parents and each variety had qualities that made them fit within the homesteader lifestyle like a glove.

The best canning bean for us was the white greasy bean. They are also the best freezing bean. The preferred fresh bean is the white half runner. They work up fast and they cook tender fairly quickly from fresh. They are also a pretty good freezer bean but not so good for canning. Both these required that they be planted in the corn in order to have a structure to run on. Both varieties do pretty good as shuck beans as well. But the overall champion general purpose bean on Grannys, Moms, or my homestead has to be the red six week bean.

The reason this topic even came up is that I am going to harvest a mess of them this morning. Six week beans are the best all round bean that you can have on a homestead. Some folks call them old Joe Clark beans or red peanut beans. I don’t know if this is true. We have raised them and saved the seed back for generations. They are a bush bean that needs no support to grow. They are heavy producing beans. They will make beans in 6 weeks from the time of planting. We wait till 8 to 10 weeks for the beans to fill out to harvest. Modern canned beans generally have no beans in them. Granny would call them flabs or in other words mainly hulls. Appalachians knew that beans could take the place of meat if you allowed the bean inside to mature. The bean is where all the protein resides. There is no protein in the hulls only fiber and a few vitamins. Thus, pinto beans saved many an Appalachian youth. So, many a mountaineer ate what northerners would call shelly beans, meaning green beans that the bean were allowed to mature and they ate them shell and all. Shuck Beans are shelly beans dried out.

No shuck beans are not dried in the field they are intentionally dried. Granny would break her beans and lay them on a sheet on a piece of tin out in the sun. She put them out in the morning after the dew burned off and took them in every evening before dark. Finally, once they had dried she stored them in a mason jar. Moms process was the same. Maw, dads mom, strung her beans with a needle and thread and hung them to dry like the picture above. This is the method that Crystal and I have used for a long time and we do a combination of both. But, lately we have taken to using a dehydrator. It has worked so well that we seldom use the other methods that take so much time. But all three methods work so well.

We store our shuck beans – leather britches- shucky beans in a mason jar just like granny. She never sucked the air out of the jar to seal it and I don’t know if it makes any difference but we suck the air out of our shuck bean jars and vacuum seal them.  We put up a lot of shuck beans some years and nearly none on others. Some of the shuck beans in the pantry are 7 years old by the time we use them and they are still fantastic. I can’t imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas Diner without them.

I think back on mom and granny and imagine how hard it was for Granny being a widow at 26 years old with 2 children only 6 and 4 years old. Her days started before daylight and ended when the chickens went to bed. There was no entertainment except that you made for yourself. Without electricity there were only coal oil (kerosene) lamps, candles, and the coal grate to light your home. You got up with the sun and went to bed when it did. I am thankful for the freezers we have and the easier way of preserving what we need to live. I am thankful for the strength to live this lifestyle and always try to remember that Homesteading and Life are Marathons not Sprints – Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride!!

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