40 Fun Facts About Beans

In Jack and the Beanstalk, which family animal does Jack trade away for a handful of magic beans?

A cow is the price, much to the dismay of Jack's widowed mother. The telling most often reprinted today is Joseph Jacobs's, from his 1890 collection English Fairy Tales.

Which US president, a jelly bean fan since quitting smoking, sent some into space on the shuttle Challenger?

Ronald Reagan gave jars of Jelly Belly beans to visiting dignitaries. In 1983 he made them the first jelly beans in space, a surprise for the astronauts aboard Challenger.

Which US city is home to Cloud Gate, the mirror-polished steel sculpture nicknamed The Bean?

Chicago unveiled the sculpture in Millennium Park in 2004. Artist Anish Kapoor took his idea from liquid mercury, and its 168 welded plates show no visible seams.

Coffee beans are really seeds, usually found in pairs inside a small fruit that growers call a coffee what?

Cherry is the growers' word for the fruit, which usually holds two seeds lying flat side to flat side. The occasional fruit with a single seed is known as a peaberry.

Vanilla beans, source of the world's second-priciest spice, are the seed pods of which family of flowers?

Orchids of the genus Vanilla grow the pods. In 1841 a 12-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion, Edmond Albius, discovered how to pollinate them by hand, which let the crop spread worldwide.

Mexican jumping beans twitch because which creature is living inside each hollowed-out seed pod?

A moth larva curls and uncurls inside, hitting the wall of the pod so that it appears to jump. The pods come from a Mexican shrub that is no relation of true beans.

Which ancient Greek thinker, famed for a theorem about triangles, forbade his followers to eat fava beans?

Pythagoras banned fava beans for reasons argued over since antiquity. One legend says he was caught and killed because he refused to escape through a bean field.

Which bean was used as money across Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest, buying items such as tamales?

Cocoa beans changed hands like coins, buying anything from tamales to a rabbit dinner. The Aztec emperor Moctezuma II was said to drink nothing but chocolate, from a golden goblet.

Which US state, once famous for its "chili queens" and their chili joints, made chili con carne its official dish?

Texas made chili its state dish in 1977; the chili queens sold theirs in San Antonio. Some purists insist the word applies only to the basic stew, with no beans or tomatoes at all.

Which so-called nut is really a relative of beans, with pods that ripen underground?

The peanut is a legume, in the same plant family as beans and peas. Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, from the Greek for 'under the earth', after its odd habit of fruiting below ground.

Which New England city is nicknamed Beantown after its baked beans sweetened with molasses?

Boston owes the nickname to its beans, baked with molasses and salt pork. The city was a rum exporter in the 18th century, and molasses is what rum is distilled from.

Which American company's baked beans first went on sale in Britain at London's Fortnum & Mason?

Heinz sold its first British tins to the London store, which bought every sample case on offer. The raw beans are sealed in the can with tomato sauce, then cooked inside it in large pressure cookers.

Lima beans are named after the capital of which country, once stamped on crates of them sent abroad?

Peru exported the beans under Spanish rule in boxes labelled with their place of origin, 'Lima, Peru', and the name stuck. In the Carolinas the large pale kind is called the butter bean.

Feijoada, a slow-cooked stew of black beans and pork, is the national dish of which country?

Brazil's feijoada is probably an adaptation of Portuguese bean stews. It is traditionally a long, leisurely Saturday lunch, served with rice, greens and slices of orange.

Cassoulet, a rich stew of beans, sausage, pork and preserved goose, comes from the south of which country?

France's town of Castelnaudary claims the dish. Tradition says cassoulet was invented there in 1355, while the town was under siege by the English in the Hundred Years' War.

Which speckled bean is the usual choice for refried beans in Tex-Mex and northern Mexican cooking?

Pinto, Spanish for 'painted', is the favourite for refried beans in the United States and northern Mexico. The dish's English name is a mistranslation: refritos means well fried, not fried twice.

Which soft white food, also called bean curd, is made by pressing the curds of soy milk into blocks?

Tofu is thought to date back some 2,000 years to China's Han dynasty. Legend credits its invention to a Han prince, Liu An.

Which legume is cooked, mashed and blended with tahini, lemon juice and garlic to make hummus?

Chickpea is exactly what the Arabic word hummus means. The dip's full name, hummus bi tahini, simply lists its two main ingredients.

Which book series features Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, sweets that come in flavours such as earwax?

Harry Potter's fictional sweets were later made for real by Jelly Belly, which kept the gruesome flavours, among them vomit, skunk spray and rotten egg.

In an idiom first recorded in the United States, someone who 'spills the beans' has done what?

Revealed a secret is the meaning. One theory traces it to ancient Greek votes cast with coloured beans, where a spilled jar gave the result away, though that may be folk etymology.

Which chili con carne bean is so rich in a natural toxin that it must be boiled hard before eating?

Kidney beans eaten raw or undercooked can cause poisoning, thanks to a lectin called phytohaemagglutinin. A slow cooker may not get hot enough to destroy it, so boil them first.

In the Three Sisters planting method of Native American farmers, beans climb the stalks of which crop?

Corn gives the beans a living trellis, and the beans steady its stalks in high winds. The third sister, squash, shades the ground with its wide leaves and keeps weeds down.

Bean plants enrich the soil because bacteria in their root nodules capture which gas from the air?

Nitrogen gas is turned into ammonia inside the nodules by bacteria called rhizobia, and the plant builds proteins from it. That is why bean crops need less fertiliser than most.

In which US city is red beans and rice a Monday tradition, dating from the days when Monday was washday?

New Orleans cooks made the dish on washday Mondays from red beans and the pork bones left over from Sunday dinner. Many neighbourhood restaurants still serve it as a Monday special.

Which Washington institution's dining room serves bean soup every day, a tradition dating from the early 1900s?

The US Senate has several stories about how the rule began, none of them proven. In 1943 wartime rationing left its kitchen short of beans, but more were found by the next day.

Which small white bean, known in Britain as the haricot, is the usual bean in a can of baked beans?

Navy beans got their American name because the US fleet has served them to its sailors as a staple since the mid-1800s. The town of Kingaroy is known as the Baked Bean Capital of Australia.

At ancient Rome's Lemuria festival, householders threw black beans behind them at midnight to ward off what?

Ghosts of the restless dead, the lemures, were thought to gather up the beans unseen. The poet Ovid, the only detailed source, has the householder walk barefoot through the house to do it.

Black-eyed peas, really a kind of bean, are eaten in the American South for luck on which holiday?

New Year's Day calls for Hoppin' John, a dish of the peas with rice and pork. The peas stand for pennies or coins, and some cooks drop a real coin into the pot.

What do botanists call the scar where a bean was attached to its pod, the 'eye' of a black-eyed pea?

Hilum is the botanical name for the mark, left on the seed coat where the seed was once attached. On some beans and peas it stands out so boldly that it is simply called the eye.

Moros y Cristianos, black beans and white rice named after medieval Spain's wars, is a dish of which country?

Cuba's dish has a name meaning Moors and Christians: the black beans stand for the Moors and the white rice for the Christians who fought over medieval Iberia.

Ful medames, a stew of fava beans dressed with olive oil and cumin, is a national dish of which country?

Egypt's medieval capital, Cairo, cooked its ful beside a public bathhouse. When the baths closed, huge pots of beans simmered all night over the embers, ready for the city's breakfast.

At Japan's Setsubun festival, families throw roasted soybeans out of the door to drive away what?

Demons, known as oni, are the target, and a relative in a mask often plays the part. Afterwards people eat one roasted bean for each year of their life, plus one more for luck.

Which small red bean is boiled with sugar and mashed into the sweet paste used across East Asian cooking?

Adzuki beans make the paste, which Japan calls anko. In Korea the beans are sometimes husked before cooking, which turns the paste white instead of red.

Which small green bean, widely grown across Asia, is sprouted to make the bean sprouts used in spring rolls?

Mung beans are very easy to sprout, needing little care beyond a steady supply of water. In Chinese cooking the sprouts also go into fried rice and hot and sour soup.

Which deadly poison is found in the seeds of the castor bean, a plant also crushed for a well-known oil?

Ricin is a highly potent toxin made in the seeds of the castor plant. Despite the name, the plant is a spurge and its seed is no true bean.

Which fragrant bean, used by perfumers and pastry chefs, has long been barred from food sold in the United States?

Tonka beans owe their sweet scent to coumarin, a chemical that has shown toxicity at extremely high concentrations. US regulators have treated food containing them as adulterated since 1954.

Tempeh, a firm cake of soybeans bound together by a fungus, is a traditional food of which country?

Indonesia's island of Java is where tempeh comes from, and it remains a staple source of protein there. The fermentation is what binds the loose beans into a cake.

Before molasses, Native American cooks baked beans in pits with maple sugar and which animal's fat?

Bear fat and maple sugar went into earthenware pots, which were buried in pits lined with hot rocks. Maine logging camps kept up these 'bean holes' and served the beans at every meal.

Which Roman clan, home of the general nicknamed 'the Delayer', was said to be named after the fava bean?

The Fabii, Pliny wrote, took their name from faba, the Latin for bean, a crop they were said to have been the first to grow. Fabius Maximus won his nickname for the strategy he used against Hannibal.

In the popular legend of Kaldi, which animals grew lively after eating coffee berries, leading their herder to the bean?

Goats nibbling bright red berries are the heart of the tale, set in 9th-century Ethiopia. It is probably apocryphal: the story first appeared in a treatise printed in Rome in 1671.