40 Fun Facts About Green Beans

Peixinhos da horta, Portugal's green beans in a crisp batter, are credited as the ancestor of which Japanese dish?

Tempura grew out of the fritters that Portuguese sailors and missionaries carried to Japan in the 1500s. The Portuguese name means little fish from the garden, after the shape of the battered pods.

Green bean casserole was created in 1955 in the test kitchen of which American food company?

Campbell's home economist Dorcas Reilly devised it as a quick dish from ingredients most households already had. She went on to run the company's home economics department.

Astronomers use the nickname 'green bean' for a rare type of which object, thought to be lit by a fading quasar?

A galaxy of this kind glows green throughout, which astronomers think is the afterglow of a quasar that has since dimmed. The name nods to the similar but smaller Green Pea galaxies.

Some varieties of green bean turn green only when cooked, starting out with raw pods of which colour?

Purple pods such as Royal Burgundy and Trionfo Violetto fade to ordinary green as they cook, so the colour never reaches the plate.

Which country grows roughly seven of every ten tonnes of the world's green beans?

China accounted for 72% of the 26 million tonnes of green beans grown worldwide in 2024, a crop sold fresh, canned and frozen.

To a botanist, the green bean pods served as a vegetable are really which part of the plant?

Fruit is the botanical term, because each pod encloses the plant's seeds. Green beans are simply picked young, before the beans inside have matured.

Raw green beans carry a natural toxin found at far higher levels in which bean, a staple of chili con carne?

Kidney beans hold so much of the toxin that as few as four or five raw ones can make a person ill. Thorough boiling destroys it, which is why green beans should not be eaten raw either.

Green bean casserole is served at an estimated 20 million American dinners on which annual holiday?

Thanksgiving is the casserole's big day, and it has been called an iconic side dish of the meal. It began as an everyday side and became a holiday fixture in the 1960s, once the recipe was printed on can labels.

The tough fibre that once ran the length of every pod earned green beans the name of which kind of bean?

String beans kept the name even after Calvin Keeney bred the first variety without the fibre in 1894. Most modern green beans have none at all.

Leaves of the green bean plant, covered in microscopic hairs, were once used in houses to trap which biting pest?

Bedbugs become entangled in the tiny hairs, called trichomes, and cannot escape. Engineers have studied the leaves as a model for man-made surfaces that trap the insects.

Which canned soup, first sold by its maker in 1934, forms the creamy sauce of green bean casserole?

Cream of mushroom was the first of its maker's soups to be marketed as a sauce as well as a soup. By the company's own estimate, about 40% of it ends up in this one dish.

Which crunchy topping, praised by one food historian as the recipe's masterstroke, finishes a green bean casserole?

Fried onions are stirred into the mix and then scattered on top for the last few minutes in the oven. Historian Laura Shapiro credited them with giving a plain convenience dish some glamour.

In the Three Sisters planting of Native American farmers, climbing beans grow alongside corn and which crop?

Squash sprawls between the mounds, its broad leaves shading the soil and holding back weeds. The corn gives the beans a stalk to climb, and the beans steady the corn in high winds.

Bacteria living in the root nodules of green bean plants pull which gas from the air, enriching the soil?

Nitrogen fixed in the nodules feeds the plant, and some of it stays behind for whatever is sown next. That is why beans have long had a place in crop rotation.

Green beans belong to which plant family, whose members also include peanuts, lentils and soybeans?

Legumes make up the third-largest family of land plants, with about 19,000 known species. Only the orchid and daisy families are bigger.

Green beans come as low 'bush' types and as climbing vines named after which support they are grown on?

Pole beans send up twisting vines that need something to climb. Farms mostly grow the low kind instead, because it ripens over a short spell and suits machine harvesting.

Yellow-podded green beans, often tossed into an American three-bean salad, are sold as which kind of bean?

Wax beans are green beans in all but colour, and most kinds grow as low bushes rather than climbing vines. Golden Wax and Rocquencourt are two of the named varieties.

Which French salad of tomatoes, olives and anchovies often gains cooked green beans, to the dismay of purists?

Niçoise purists such as Jacques Médecin, a former mayor of Nice, insisted that no boiled vegetable belonged in the salad. Cooks around the world add green beans and potatoes anyway.

Dilly beans, a jarred snack flavoured with garlic and red pepper, are green beans preserved by which method?

Pickling with dill, the herb behind the name, turns a glut of green beans into a snack that keeps. Dilly beans went on sale commercially in 1958, backed by a well-known radio campaign.

Before freezing, green beans are briefly boiled and then plunged into an ice bath in which kitchen technique?

Blanching switches off the enzymes that would otherwise spoil the colour, flavour and texture of stored vegetables. The cold plunge that halts the cooking is known as shocking.

The yardlong bean, a long-podded Asian cousin of the green bean, is also named after which other green vegetable?

Asparagus bean is the plant's other widely used name, alongside snake bean and long bean. Despite the yardlong label, its pods usually stop at about half a yard.

Green beans are the unripe pods of which species, the same plant that yields pinto, navy and black beans?

Common bean is the everyday name for Phaseolus vulgaris, first farmed some 8,000 years ago. Whether it reaches the shop as a pod or a dried bean depends on the variety and when it is picked.

Fasolakia, a dish of green beans simmered in olive oil, belongs to the ladera cooking of which country?

Greece gives the name ladera, literally 'oily', to vegetable dishes cooked this way. Okra, peas and leeks get the same treatment.

Home-canned green beans, a low-acid food, must be processed under pressure to prevent which rare, paralysing illness?

Botulism has most often been traced to home-canned, low-acid foods such as green beans, beets and corn. A pressure canner reaches 240°F, far hotter than an open boiling pot.

Green beans are a moderate source of which nutrient, the one the body needs for blood to clot?

Vitamin K takes its letter from Koagulation, as coagulation is spelled in Danish and German. Without it, clotting is badly impaired and bleeding becomes hard to stop.

Scarlet runner beans, popular in British kitchen gardens, are also grown as ornamentals for which red feature?

Flowers of bright red earned the plant a place in ornamental gardens as well as vegetable plots. In Britain the blooms came to be treated as a bonus to the crop of pods.

Which Midwestern state leads the United States in growing green beans for canning and freezing?

Wisconsin also ranks first for cranberries and ginseng, growing more than half of the national cranberry crop. Growers call the processing crop snap beans.

The original recipe card for green bean casserole was donated in 2002 to which American hall of fame?

The National Inventors Hall of Fame received it from Dorcas Reilly, the home economist who wrote the recipe. She became known as the grandmother of the green bean bake.

Raw green beans are roughly nine-tenths which substance, leaving room for only 31 calories per 100 grams?

Water makes up about 90% of a raw green bean. Carbohydrates account for roughly 7% and protein 2%, with almost no fat.

In Appalachian cooking, 'leather britches' are green beans preserved for winter by which old method?

Drying on a thread, usually behind a wood stove, shrivels the pods until they look like tiny leather trousers. The dish is also known as shucky beans.

Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen, famed for his experiments on bean seeds, coined which word now basic to biology?

Gene was his replacement for pangene, a term that came from Darwin's theory of pangenesis. Johannsen also gave biology the words genotype and phenotype.

Wide, flat-podded green beans are sold under which Italian-sounding name, also borne by a hard Italian cheese?

Romano beans are also sold as helda beans, and are cooked and served as whole pods like any other green bean. Picked young, modern kinds have no tough fibres to remove.

Green bean breeders can fix a new variety quickly because the plant's blossoms usually reproduce in which way?

Self-pollination lets each bloom fertilise itself, which makes it easier to select varieties that stay stable from one generation to the next. More than 130 edible-pod varieties are known.

Green bean casserole was invented in a company test kitchen in Camden, a city in which US state?

New Jersey's Camden housed the company's home economics department, which turned out hundreds of recipes. A tuna noodle casserole came from the same kitchen.

In Japan green beans are called ingen, after a 17th-century immigrant of which calling said to have brought them?

A Buddhist monk named Ingen landed at Nagasaki in 1654 and went on to found the Obaku school of Zen. The bean said to have travelled with him is still called ingen-mame.

Peixinhos da horta, Portugal's battered green beans, were eaten to keep the fasting rules of which Christian season?

Lent and the Ember days barred meat for Catholics, so crisp vegetables in batter took its place on the table. The dish is still made with green beans and a wheat-flour batter.

The toxin that makes raw green beans unsafe belongs to which family of sugar-binding proteins?

Lectins latch on to sugars on the surface of cells, and the one in beans can clump red blood cells together. Heat destroys it, so green beans from the pan are harmless.

The yardlong bean is a variety of which crop, better known for giving the American South its black-eyed peas?

Cowpea plants bred for their pods rather than their seeds became the yardlong bean. Its Latin name, sesquipedalis, means a foot and a half long.

The runner bean, usually sown afresh each spring in cool climates, is really which kind of plant, with tuberous roots?

A perennial by nature, the runner bean can live for years, though gardeners in cold places treat it as an annual. Its starchy roots are eaten in Mesoamerica.

Green bean casserole was devised in 1955 for a feature article distributed by which news service?

The Associated Press wanted a quick, easy dish made from ingredients most American households kept on hand. The recipe was first printed under the name Green Bean Bake.