THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, December 15, 1995 TAG: 9512150496
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
How far north do you have to go before snaps become green beans?
That question on terminology from Karen Crawford would seem to be easily resolved.
There's a grits line which begins to fade around Richmond and ends somewhere in Maryland.
And one meets, now and then, a snow line in Tidewater around Williamsburg.
So it would seem that a snaps line could be determined without much agitation.
The question arose when Karen and her husband, Richard, principal of Hardy Elementary School in Smithfield, fell to wondering why their children called them green beans.
``He grew up calling them string beans and I grew up calling them snaps and we wondered how in the world we raised three children who call them green beans,'' she said.
You see, already the question was becoming more complex with string beans entering the picture.
It heightened when a friend from western North Carolina recalled a variety, ``greasy-back beans,'' that differed from ordinary string beans in being ``considerably plumper.''
And it flew off the radar screen when a colleague, Brooklyn-born Peggy Earle, declared, ``I've eaten string beans all my life!''
The picture in my mind from childhood is my mother with a bowl in her lap, stringing - or, rather, unstringing string beans and still another image of her snapping snap beans.
Indeed, I can to this day hear those beans snap. Crisply.
Out in Wise in Southwest Virginia, Reba Smiddy, a noted cook, heard nothing of snap beans. She recalls string beans and, when the strings had been removed, the long, otherwise intact beans were threaded and hung to dry, after which they were called leather britches.
Joe Smiddy, her husband and former chancellor of Clinch Valley College, remembers sitting as a boy near the hearth, stringing beans with leather britches in mind. They were that good.
A fellow columnist and Georgia expatriate, Perry Morgan, declared that calling them green beans is to distinguish them from all other beans, including butter beans, Navy and pinto beans.
``Snap beans and string beans are simply two forms of green beans,'' Morgan said. ``Both string beans and snap beans have strings, but the snap bean strings are so trifling that they can be ignored.''
The trend these days is to cook string beans or anything else, including clothes pins, three to five minutes on the grounds that any thing more removes the nutrients.
In other days, Karen recalled, the beans boiled a long time in a pot with a piece of fatback for seasoning. With red-skinned potatoes boiled with them, they were unbeatable.
Yes, yes, and when they were done, the juices left in the pot made an elixir, a pot likker which, with cornbread, was ineffable. by CNB