Green beans saved the day with Mary Hadley

I went to a wedding “here while back” (which is West Tennessee parlance for “some time ago,” it could be two days, two weeks… or two years) where 65 pounds of green beans were cooked for the reception afterward.

Sixty-five pounds!

Were they expecting Coxey’s Army, the Chicago Bears, AND the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

You talk about a situation teeming with questions, and possibilities. How many pots would it take to cook 65 pounds of green beans? How big was the truck that hauled in that kind of load? If you stacked the beans on top of each other would they reach as high as Jack had to climb? If you laid them end-to-end, would they stretch from Phenix City, Alabama, to Topeka, Kansas?

I rode to the reception trying to visualize rinsing, topping the stem off, and snapping that many beans into good eating size. I am no expert on the subject by any stretch of the imagination. But I have eaten, and picked, enough of them to have some walking-around knowledge on how they get from the garden to your plate.

There are a few pluses associated with green beans. When harvesting them, they don’t eat your skin up like cutting that okra does. Mom was always going to rinse them thoroughly so you didn’t have to shake every speck of dirt off. And they taste a whole heap better than beets, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts.

The downside is they don’t taste anything like spaghetti, cheeseburgers, or butter pecan ice cream. 

Leon always classified green beans as having a neutral taste. “Filling and wholesome” is the way he referred to them. I can assure you from the amount he didn’t eat, it was not a ringing endorsement.

Mom would only cook them in a copper pot. I have no clue why. It could have been an old-timey, even medieval, hand-me-down superstition. More than likely it was how Granny did it. I never tasted any copper. Mom cooked them down so much that I didn’t hardly even taste the green beans.

They were piping hot and falling apart when they reached your plate. Mom had simmered them to a dull, faded-out green. And she served them straight up. They were never sauteed, filled with ham hocks, sprinkled with parmesan cheese or panko bread crumbs. She might throw in a bacon strip or two if company was coming. 

We did not have green beans at every meal. Maybe every other day… But “believe you me,” (West Tennessee for “this is the gospel truth” or “I’m telling you this with my hand up”) everyone in the Colbert household ate their fair share of them!

If we had an official function back in the day, like lunch with the Rotary Club for being named student of the month, they would serve roast beef, mashed potatoes, and green beans. It would be the same fare at the Valentine’s meal at church or both years I attended the Junior-Senior banquet in high school.

Green beans in our formative eating years were as staple as a staple could be! But that still doesn’t guarantee we munched down 65 pounds of the things….

I wish now I’d been counting…or, I should say, weighing.

Leon often told us about eating at the fancy Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville. He swears the waiters were all wearing white gloves. He allowed they brought out a special tray of cold forks and offered him one to eat his salad with.

He also said the roast beef plate only had three green beans on it, and they were not topped. They were not cut into pieces. And they had not been cooked. Waxed maybe, but not cooked! It was, in his words, “the brightest green, green beans in the history of green beans.”

Of course, Leon also swears he was captured by Martians in 1959 in that field behind Archie Moore’s Pond and carried up into their spaceship. They hooked him up to a machine that read his mind.

Mary Hadley Hayden invited me to eat with her family not two weeks after we started dating. I thought it was a little quick. I was sure of it when Mrs. Hayden rolled out the food, roast beef, Brussels sprouts, English peas, and green beans.

I wanted to make a good impression. I couldn’t hardly choke down the Brussels sprouts. You know how those English peas roll all over your plate. And she didn’t serve any mashed potatoes, which I could have “run” my peas into and hemmed them up a mite. Time and proper decorum dictated that I couldn’t stick my fork in each individual pea.

The sprouts and peas were out. I certainly couldn’t have her thinking that I was thinking she couldn’t cook! There seemed to be only one option left to avoid a train wreck at the dinner table. I politely selected two appropriately sized pieces of roast beef, and then filled the rest of my plate with 65 pounds of green beans….

Respectfully,

Kes