About Beckyandthebeanstock.com

I’ll admit it: I’m a packrat. Take my 12 full shelves double-parked with books. Open any of those books and a provisional marker will flutter to the floor – a theatre ticket, a symphony program, a plane stub, a parking citation (probably paid). My basement holds (among much other stuff) a box sheltering birthday cards and love notes, pressed flowers and special rocks, scribbles, daydreams, and my first attempt at a novel (oh my!), things stretching back to the time before I could tell time. In an overzealous stab at organization, just before the holiday baking season I inventoried my kitchen and logged it all into a database. What I found was astonishing: 12 kinds of flour, 4 sorts of chocolate, 17 vinegars (three of them homemade), uncountable beans and seeds and grains, mixes and powders and potions, some of which I’ve long forgotten the purpose of. I keep stuff.

Pack-ratting is the reason I write – and the reason I cook. Both are ways of holding onto things — memories and possibilities, history and traditions, celebrations and wild places. I’m a preservationist of the most primal sort.

Food is a riot of history. Take the Tennis Ball, a descriptively (but inaccurately) named head lettuce dating all the way back to 1804, and later grown by Thomas Jefferson in his prized gardens at Monticello. Or the well-loved Cherokee Trail of Tears, a black kidney bean, which was sown in hems and hat brims and smuggled along the 1,200-mile forced march across the country.

There’s a certain mythology to food, too. On New Year’s Eve, traditions abound for what kinds of foods – if ingested at the witching hour — will result in good luck for the coming year. Black-eyed peas or pickled herring, anyone? In Pennsylvania Dutch country, if you consumed spring greens on Maundy Thursday, you were guaranteed good health in the year ahead.

One of the most remarkable heirloom stories is that of the New Mexico Cave Bean. As the story goes, archaeologists found this maroon and white specimen sealed with pine pitch in an Anasazi clay pot in a cave in New Mexico. Carbon dated at over 1,500 years old, some of the seed managed to germinate, and today there is a viable seed supply. Another bean, passed down since the 1880′s, reportedly was recovered from the craw of a wild turkey by a hunter who shot it, and thus dubbed the Turkey Craw Bean.

Are these stories true? I don’t know, but I believe them.

And so, this site is a celebration of food. It is about hailing the beauty and diversity in the plant world and the joy of cooking and eating with friends, and the stories that emerge from those experiences. It’s a recipe site, reaching for the most creative and freshest ways to prepare the food we eat and share. It’s about holding onto the things that matter, those bits and pieces that will become our own history.

About the Bean Project

How many beans can you name? If you’re bean-literate, you might be familiar with 12 or so. Astonishingly, there are about 4,000 different varieties of what we loosely call “bean” that are cultivated in the United States alone. But many of these are barely surviving, maintained by a small group of preservationists and home gardeners who have fallen in love with the possibilities.

Diversity is nature’s wild card. Prehistoric people consumed close to 1,500 wild plants and cultivated about 500 of them. Today, we depend on about 30 plants for 95% of our food needs.

This puts our food supply at risk, and places many plants in extinction’s path. In a world where we’re all trying to be the same, so much depends upon the quirks that make us distinct. And so it is with the biological diversity in our food choices, that wild but tenuous jumble of living plants, animals and seeds.

Save Our Plants: Eat Them!

The Plan: I’m going to eat my way through a year’s worth of heirloom beans. For all of 2008, each week I’ll track down, obtain, and cook with a different variety of bean – Moon beans, tepary beans, black valentine, Chinese red, a whole kaleidoscope of beans, most of them heirlooms (but if I’m getting desperate by November, we’ll see). Fifty-two different beans. This will be a true celebration of the beauty and diversity of one small part of the foods available to us today.

I’ll give you the history of the beans, images, recipes, and info about where I got them. The recipes will be fitted to the particular bean. In theory – and often times, in practice – a bean is a bean is a bean. That seems unfair. I’ll do my best to place these beans in dishes that suit their characteristics, to bring out their subtle flavors and balance the dominant ones.

My hope is that this will help reintroduce these beans into the food chain. That is, I hope you will go out and look for these beans, buy them, grow them, steal them (but not from me), talk about them, and above all, celebrate them and give them a permanent place on your table.

About Rebecca Pastor

Becky Pastor is a St. Louis-based writer and editor. She has published a variety of work, including feature articles and book reviews. Her work has focused on cooking, health, diabetes, sustainability issues in food production, green living, ecology, heirlooms, botany and gardening. Her most recent publications include three cover stories and several features for Sauce Magazine. She copyedited the books in the St. Louis Metromorphosis Book Series, including the recently published St. Louis Plans: The Ideal and the Real St. Louis (December 2007).  She spends her days writing PR, proposals and other things for a think tank at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Previous writing projects have included patient curriculum development and medical proposals for Barnes-Jewish Hospital’s Diabetes Education, as well as work with the Clayton Farmer’s Market; Abundant Life Seed Foundation and Seeds For Tomorrow. She is accomplished in grant writing, public relations and community collaboration.

Becky holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Fiction, from the University of Missouri – St. Louis. She now ventures back into the classroom, on the other side of the desk: she teaches writing classes at Webster University.  In a previous life, she directed the recycling programs for the City of St. Louis. A long, long, long time ago, she was a social worker. Writing is a much better-suited gig.

Becky has been studying global warming and climate trends since she was 13 (and that was even longer ago than her stint as a social worker). She is currently working out a plan for taking it on, and no doubt her writing forays will reflect this. Stay tuned.

Contact Becky Pastor

Links to a few of Becky’s published articles:

Brad’s Pit and Other Trashy Tales — a personal essay about my worst job ever (truly), published in Cimarron Review, Summer 2011. 

Sauce Magazine’s 2010 “The List” (I’ll send you something food-y if you can guess which two items are mine)  December 2010

The List Part II — More from Sauce Magazine (I wrote two of these too — can you guess which ones?)

A Fraiche Start: Cheese-making Cultures Put Authentic Crème Fraîche Within Reach (Sauce Magazine, November 2010)

Whey Cool: Hard Cheeses Aren’t Too Hard to Make at Home (Sauce Magazine, July 2010)

In Praise of Braises: A Primer on Simmering Vegetarian Dishes (Sauce Magazine, March 2010)

The Heat of Summer: It’s High Time for Hot Peppers and Harissa (Sauce Magazine, August 2009)

He Said/She Said: Hail to Caesar! (Sauce Magazine, June 2008)

He Said/She Said: The Crabbier, the Better (Sauce Magazine, April 2008)

He Said/She Said: Where to Catch the Perfect Fry (Sauce Magazine, October 2007)

Green Up Your Act: Easy Ways to Conserve Energy in the Home Kitchen (Sauce Magazine, March 2007)

Grounds for Change: Fair Trade and Organic Provide a Socially Conscious Cup (Sauce Magazine, 2006)

Dinosaurs in the Garden: Discover Heirlooms’ Long-forgotten Tastes (Sauce Magazine, 2005)

Little Bean with the Big Influence: St. Louis is a soy Protein Production Hot Spot (Sauce Magazine, 2005)