The beans that feed the world today are overwhelmingly Phaseolus vulgaris, the common bean, and one of the most striking facts of their natural history is that they were domesticated not once but twice, in two distant lands, from two genetically distinct wild populations of the same species. In the highlands of Mexico and Central America, around 7,000 BCE, the early farming peoples selected wild P. vulgaris to produce what botanists call the Middle American gene pool, the lineage that gives us the black bean, the pinto, the navy or haricot bean, and the small Mesoamerican varieties. Simultaneously and entirely independently, far to the south, the communities of the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia domesticated a second, genetically separate population of the same wild bean around 6,000 BCE, producing the Andean gene pool, the lineage of the large kidney bean, the cannellini, and the Peruvian canary bean. The two stocks evolved in isolation from one another for many thousands of years, diverging in seed size, colour, and growth habit, before any human being carried one to meet the other.
The common bean was, from the beginning, a partner crop rather than a solitary one. Across the Americas it was sown as one of the Three Sisters, the companion planting in which maize provided a living pole for the bean vines to climb, the beans fixed atmospheric nitrogen into the soil through the bacteria in their roots and so replenished the ground the hungry maize exhausted, and the broad leaves of the squash shaded out the weeds and held the moisture in the earth. The nutritional logic was as elegant as the agronomic one, for maize and beans eaten together supply between them a fuller complement of amino acids than either does alone, the bean's protein completing the grain's. Both American lineages of P. vulgaris crossed to Europe with the Columbian Exchange between the 1490s and the 1530s, and almost every common bean eaten anywhere in the world today descends from these two American origins. They should not be confused with the other plants that English carelessly calls beans: the fava or broad bean (Vicia faba), the mung and adzuki beans (Vigna radiata and V. angularis), and the soybean (Glycine max) are entirely separate genera with their own deep and independent histories across the Old World, cultivated there for thousands of years before the American bean arrived to take their ancient name.
Phaseolus vulgaris arrived in Europe through two channels at very nearly the same moment. Spanish explorers returning from the Caribbean and the Spanish Main after 1492 brought home the seeds of the Mesoamerican varieties, whilst Portuguese navigators and traders, working the Atlantic coast of South America after Cabral's landfall in Brazil in 1500, carried the Andean varieties, the great kidney beans amongst them, back to Lisbon. Within a single generation both lineages had taken root in the gardens of Spain and Portugal, and within two they had spread through the Italian peninsula, into France, and as far as the Ottoman court. The speed of the bean's adoption was extraordinary, far swifter than the long, suspicious reception accorded the tomato or the potato, and the reason lay in its sheer usefulness: the dried bean was lighter than meat, cheaper than fish, storable for years without salting or smoking, and nutritionally rich enough to carry a labouring population through the winter. In an age perpetually shadowed by dearth, here was a protein that kept indefinitely in a sack, and Europe seized upon it.
The American bean travelled outward from Iberia along the trade routes of the two colonial empires almost as fast as it had crossed the Atlantic. Portuguese maritime traders carried dried beans as ship's provisions down their established West African circuits, planting them in the Cape Verde islands by 1495 and on the Senegambian mainland soon after, where the newcomer joined the ancient indigenous cowpea in the cooking of the Wolof, the Akan, and the peoples of the Guinea coast. The same Portuguese networks carried the kidney bean east around the Cape to the Malabar coast and the colony at Goa, from which it travelled north into the Punjab to become rajma; and overland and maritime routes brought P. vulgaris to China by the 1620s and to Japan, where a Chinese monk introduced the related runner bean in 1654. Wherever it arrived, the bean did not merely survive but was naturalised so completely that its foreign origin was forgotten, taking on the spices and the cooking methods of each new home and becoming, in turn, the rajma of the Punjab, the feijão of Brazil and Portugal, the haricot of the French cassoulet, the fagioli of Tuscany, the waakye bean of Ghana, and the akara of Senegal. Few plants have ever travelled so far so fast, or disguised themselves so thoroughly as a native of everywhere.
Phaseolus vulgaris is the most widely consumed bean on the planet, an everyday staple across Latin America, the Mediterranean, West Africa, South Asia, and beyond, and the quiet protein of more poor and prosperous kitchens than almost any other single food. Its two American gene pools, the Mesoamerican and the Andean, together underpin thousands of regional dishes under dozens of local names, so many that the same humble seed appears scarcely recognisable from one country to the next: the black bean simmered into the frijoles de la olla of Mexico and the feijoada of Brazil; the kidney bean slow-cooked with spice into the rajma of Delhi's street stalls and stewed with pork into the fabada of Asturias; the white cannellini of Tuscan ribollita; the haricot of the contested cassoulet of Languedoc; the navy bean of Boston's molasses-dark baked beans; the waakye bean of the Ghanaian roadside. In each the bean has absorbed the local seasoning so completely that its common American ancestry is all but invisible.
The wider family to which the common bean lends its English name encompasses several other species of global importance, each older in the Old World than P. vulgaris by thousands of years: the fava or broad bean (Vicia faba) of the ancient Mediterranean, the mung bean (Vigna radiata) and adzuki (Vigna angularis) of monsoon Asia, and the soybean (Glycine max) of East Asia, whose ferments and curds form a civilisation of their own. In the twenty-first century the bean has acquired a new prominence. As the environmental and nutritional case for plant proteins moves to the centre of debate, the legume has been rediscovered as one of the most complete and ecologically efficient foods available to humanity: high in protein and fibre, low in fat, cheap to grow, and uniquely capable, through its nitrogen-fixing roots, of enriching rather than exhausting the soil it grows in. The food that the Tuscans once dismissed as la carne dei poveri, the meat of the poor, is now reckoned amongst the most quietly important crops on earth.
Historical Journey of Beans
Oaxacan Highlands, Mexico — c. 7000 BCE
In the highland valleys of Oaxaca and Jalisco, around 7,000 BCE, the early farming peoples of Mexico took the wild common bean into cultivation, accomplishing the first of the two great independent domestications of Phaseolus vulgaris and founding what botanists call the Middle American gene pool. From this single origin descend the black bean, the pinto, the small navy bean, and the tepary, the beans that to this day form the protein heart of Mexican and Central American cooking. The bean was never grown alone but as one of the Three Sisters, sown amongst the maize and the squash in a companion planting of remarkable sophistication: the cornstalk gave the climbing bean its pole, the bean drew nitrogen from the air into the soil to feed the hungry maize, and the sprawling squash shaded out the weeds, the three crops together yielding far more, and a far better diet, than any could alone. Cooked simply, the beans became frijoles de la olla, the pot beans simmered slowly with onion, garlic, and epazote that remain the everyday food of the Mexican table; mashed and fried in lard they become the frijoles refritos that fill the tortilla and the tamal. This Mexican domestication was wholly independent of, and some thousand years earlier than, the separate taming of the bean far to the south in the Andes, two peoples on one continent arriving at the same crop unknown to each other.
Ancash Highlands, Peru — c. 6000 BCE
Far to the south of the Mexican highlands, and entirely unaware of them, the peoples of the high Andes of Peru carried out the second independent domestication of Phaseolus vulgaris, taming a genetically distinct wild population of the same species to found the Andean gene pool. The evidence lies in the charred bean remains recovered from Guitarrero Cave in the Ancash region, dated to around 6,000 BCE, amongst the oldest cultivated beans known anywhere. From this Andean lineage descend the large-seeded varieties that the world would come to prize: the kidney bean, the cannellini, the great white beans of the European stew pot, and the speckled Peruvian canary bean. These Andean beans grew in the terraced fields of the high valleys alongside the potato, quinoa, and maize that sustained the civilisations culminating in the Inca, and they remain central to the Andean kitchen, simmered with quinoa into hearty highland soups and fried with rice into the Peruvian tacu tacu. The two gene pools, Mexican and Andean, evolved in complete isolation from one another for thousands of years, diverging in size, colour, and habit, and they would not be brought together until Spanish and Portuguese ships carried both across the Atlantic in the decades after 1492, the Columbian Exchange at last uniting in the gardens of Europe two crops that one continent had domesticated twice over.
Guatemalan & Chiapan Highlands — c. 2500 BCE
In the cool, misted cloud-forest highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas, at elevations where the common bean cannot thrive, a different and grander legume was taken into cultivation: Phaseolus coccineus, the runner bean, known across Mesoamerica by its Nahuatl name, the ayocote. Larger, meatier, and more deeply earthy in flavour than P. vulgaris, and bearing a striking scarlet flower, the ayocote became the prestige bean of the highland kitchen, the legume reserved for festivals, for the great composite sauces called moles, and for ceremonial feasting rather than for daily bread. The black ayocote negro and the purple ayocote morado remain central to Oaxacan and Guatemalan highland cooking to this day, their plump bodies standing up to the long, slow cooking of the mole pot, where the ayocote negro is simmered into the dark, chilli-and-chocolate-scented mole negro of Oaxaca, one of the most elaborate preparations in all of Mexican cuisine. The runner bean carries a further distinction in the bean's global story: it was this species, and not the common bean, that the Chinese Zen monk Ingen Ryūki took with him to Japan in 1654, where the legume was named ingen-mame in his honour, so that a bean of the Guatemalan cloud forest came to bear, in the Japanese kitchen, the name of a Buddhist teacher.
Ica Valley, Peruvian Coast — c. 2000 BCE
On the desert coast of Peru a third independent domestication of the genus Phaseolus took shape, producing the lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus), known in Peru as the pallar. Genetically separate from both highland lineages of the common bean, the lima was cultivated in the irrigated river valleys that thread the coastal desert like green ribbons through bare sand, from La Libertad in the north south through the great oasis of Ica, where the bean has been grown for some four thousand years. The large, flat, kidney-shaped Andean pallar became the definitive bean of Peru's coastal cuisine, eaten fresh and green, dried for the store, and ground into pastes and purées, and its image appears woven and painted in the art of the ancient coastal cultures of the Moche and the Nazca, who held it in evident esteem. The bean took its English name not from any Peruvian word but from Lima, the colonial capital from whose port it was shipped to the world, the city's name stamped on the sacks. The pallar crossed to Europe alongside the common bean in the wake of the Spanish conquest, but its truest identity remains Peruvian and coastal, expressed above all in the chupe, the rich, milky chowder of the Pacific shore: chupe de pallares, the lima bean simmered with potato, cheese, and aji into a soup that is one of the defining comfort foods of the Peruvian coast.
New England, United States — c. 1000 CE
The common bean, descended from the Mexican Middle American gene pool, made its way slowly northward across the continent through the trade networks of indigenous peoples, passing up through what is now the American Southwest and then eastward into the Eastern Woodlands, until by approximately 1,000 CE it had reached the northeastern Atlantic coast. There it became the second of the Three Sisters, the agricultural foundation of the Haudenosaunee, the Algonquian-speaking nations, and the other peoples of the woodlands: the beans climbed the maize stalks and fixed nitrogen into the soil the maize had drained, whilst the squash spread its leaves below to smother the weeds and hold the moisture, the three crops grown together in a single mound and eaten together in a single pot. When Puritan colonists arrived in New England in the seventeenth century they found this system long established and adopted it wholesale, learning from their indigenous neighbours both to grow the bean and to cook it, as in the corn-and-bean stew the Narragansett called succotash. From the meeting of native bean cultivation with English traditions of pork preservation came the archetypal dish of the region, Boston baked beans, small white navy beans baked slowly for hours with molasses and salt pork until dark, sweet, and tender, a dish so identified with the city that it earned Boston the nickname of Beantown. The bean thus stood at the very foundation of New England's foodways, an indigenous American crop that the colonists could not have done without.
Spain — c. 1493
Columbus returned to Spain in 1493 carrying, amongst the wonders of the New World, the seeds of Phaseolus vulgaris gathered in the Caribbean, and over the following generation seed of both the Mesoamerican and the Andean lineages found its way into Iberian soil. The Spanish recognised the bean at once for what it was, a legume of exceptional utility, portable, all but imperishable when dried, cheap, and nutritionally rich, and they took it up readily, not least as a provision for the long ocean voyages on which a sack of dried beans was worth its weight in security against hunger. The bean's greatest Spanish triumph came on the cool, wet Atlantic coast of the north, in Asturias, where the large, buttery white Andean beans called fabes were embraced as the soul of fabada asturiana: a slow-simmered stew of those great white beans with chorizo, the blood sausage morcilla, and salt pork, cooked until the broth turns unctuous and the beans melt on the tongue, a dish that became the canonical glory of the region and stands amongst the finest bean preparations in all of European cooking. The American newcomer did not displace Spain's own ancient legume, for the broad or fava bean (haba) had been grown in Iberia since antiquity and held its place, above all in Andalusia, where young habas cooked with cured Ibérico ham remain a classic of the spring table. From Spain, the American bean would travel onward across the whole of Europe and out along the sea routes of empire.
Portugal — c. 1494
Phaseolus vulgaris crossed from Spain into Portugal in the mid-1490s through the dense commercial and court networks connecting the two Iberian crowns, arriving within a year or two of Columbus returning the bean to Seville in 1493. Portugal's own Atlantic contact with South America came with Pedro Álvares Cabral's Brazil voyage in 1500, which added Andean kidney bean varieties to the Mesoamerican ones already circulating in Lisbon's markets. From Lisbon, Portuguese traders and navigators carried dried beans as ship's provisions through their Atlantic network to Cape Verde as early as 1495 and east to the Malabar Coast and Goa by the early 1500s; dried beans were among the most portable and calorically dense provisions available for oceanic voyages. Within Portugal, the bean found its most articulate expression in the granite highlands of Trás-os-Montes in the northeast, where it was slow-cooked with chouriço, morcela, and salt pork belly and finished with couve (Portuguese kale) to produce feijoada à Transmontana: the template through which the Portuguese understanding of feijão, as something to be cooked long and slow with flavourful additions until the broth thickened, was exported to Cape Verde, Brazil, and Goa.
Cape Verde — c. 1495
American Phaseolus vulgaris beans arrived in Cape Verde at the turn of the 16th century, carried by Portuguese navigators on the Atlantic circuits that connected the Caribbean and the Iberian Peninsula to the mid-Atlantic islands. In Cape Verde, the Columbian Exchange bean joined an ingredient landscape already shaped by the West African cowpea (Vigna unguiculata, known in Cape Verdean Portuguese as feijão congo), which had arrived from the Guinea coast and the Senegambian interior through the same trading networks that populated the islands. Cachupa, the Creole national stew, holds both legume traditions in a single pot: American kidney beans and West African black-eyed peas simmered alongside dried hominy corn, cassava, sweet potato, and Atlantic tuna, seasoned with turmeric from the Portuguese Indian Ocean spice trade. No other single dish assembles the material geography of the Atlantic world as comprehensively as cachupa: an American grain, an American bean, a West African cowpea, a South American root, and an Indian spice, all meeting in a volcanic Atlantic island and transformed into something entirely its own.
Languedoc, France — c. 1500s
The common bean crossed into southern France from Spain by the early sixteenth century, most probably along the old trading and pilgrimage routes that linked Catalonia and Aragon to Languedoc and Roussillon, and it found there one of its most celebrated homes in all of Europe. The white haricot became the foundation of cassoulet, the great slow-baked gratin of the southwest: dried white beans cooked long and gently with preserved duck or goose (confit), garlicky Toulouse sausage, and pork rind, the surface crust broken down into the beans again and again as it cooks until the whole achieves a melting, savoury richness. Its very name records the bean's importance, deriving from the cassole, the glazed earthenware dish in which it is baked. The exact and authentic form of cassoulet is the subject of one of the fiercest of all French gastronomic feuds, contested between the towns of Carcassonne, Toulouse, and Castelnaudary, each insisting that its own version alone is true and the others' impostures, a quarrel of provincial identity pursued for more than a century with entirely serious passion. Beyond the cassoulet pot, the bean took a gentler French role in the flageolet, the pale green, semi-mature haricot picked before it dries, which became the canonical companion to a roast leg of lamb in the bourgeois kitchen, a pairing so settled that it remains standard in French home cooking to this day. The word haricot itself, possibly carried from the Nahuatl ayacotl, marks the bean as a New World guest naturalised at the very heart of the French table.
Senegambia — c. 1510s
Phaseolus vulgaris reached the Senegambian coast in the early 16th century via the Cape Verde trading axis: the Portuguese had used the islands as their primary entrepôt for the Senegambian trade since the 1460s, and with beans already established in Cape Verde by 1495, the crossing to the adjacent mainland was both short and immediate. The Portuguese had been trading in Senegambia since the 1440s, a generation before they reached the Gold Coast, and the feitorias along the Gambia River and the Casamance coast were among the most active in their entire African network. In Senegambian and Wolof cooking, P. vulgaris joined a pre-existing legume culture already centred on cowpeas (Vigna unguiculata), the indigenous West African pulse that had been cultivated in the Sahel for millennia. Akara, the deep-fried bean fritter sold from communal pots at dawn and dusk across Senegal and Gambia, belongs to this older cowpea tradition; with the arrival of P. vulgaris, it was gradually absorbed into the same fritter repertoire. It was this cowpea-based akara that enslaved West Africans carried across the Atlantic to Bahia in Brazil, where it became acarajé, now recognised as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage element.
Tuscany, Italy — c. 1530s
The common bean reached Italy by way of Spain and Portugal in the 1530s, and its first Italian home was a distinguished one: it was cultivated as a botanical curiosity in the papal gardens and the Florentine collections of the learned, the humanist Piero Valeriano famously receiving seed as a gift from Pope Clement VII and writing of it. From the gardens of the great it passed swiftly downward, and within a generation it had become the food of the poor, earning across Italy the telling name la carne dei poveri, 'the meat of the poor', a phrase that captures at once its nutritional generosity and its lowly social station. Nowhere was it embraced more wholeheartedly than in Tuscany. There the white beans of the Andean gene pool, the cannellini and the toscanelli, became the defining ingredient of the regional kitchen, simmered with rosemary, sage, garlic, and tomato into fagioli all'uccelletto, cooked slowly in a flask by the dying embers as fagioli al fiasco, and layered with stale bread and winter greens into ribollita, the 'reboiled' bread-and-bean soup that is the quintessential Florentine peasant dish. So devoted to the legume did the Tuscans become that other Italians dubbed them mangiafagioli, 'bean-eaters', a nickname worn with a mixture of pride and rueful good humour, and the bean remains as central to the cooking of Tuscany as the olive oil that dresses it.
Ghana — c. 1550s
Portuguese traders introduced the common bean to the Gold Coast of West Africa in the middle of the sixteenth century, one more cargo carried along the dense Atlantic network that linked their Brazilian and Caribbean sources to the African shore. The bean integrated rapidly into the West African kitchen, for a storable, high-protein legume needed no persuading into a cuisine already built upon the indigenous cowpea and the grains sorghum and millet, and it slipped easily into established ways of cooking pulses. In what is now Ghana, the northern Hausa practice of cooking beans together with grain evolved into waakye, the dish that has become a national institution: beans and rice are boiled together with the dried red leaves and stalks of sorghum, which stain the whole pot a deep, distinctive red-brown and lend a faint, earthy, almost fermented note. Waakye is above all a food of the morning and the street, ladled from great pots at roadside stalls across Accra from dawn, and it is served in a manner of magnificent abundance, heaped with spaghetti, fried sweet plantain, gari, a boiled egg, and a fierce spoonful of shito, the dark, pungent sauce of black pepper, dried chilli, and smoked fish. In waakye the American bean became one of the cornerstones of Ghanaian daily eating, as familiar and as beloved as any food in the country.
Nigeria — c. 1550s
The common bean entered what is now Nigeria through the coastal trade networks of the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, in the middle of the sixteenth century, joining a cuisine already deeply versed in the cooking of pulses. In the kitchens of the Yoruba and the Igbo the legume was absorbed at once into an old and sophisticated tradition of bean cookery centred on the indigenous cowpea, the black-eyed pea, and it became indispensable. That tradition's two great expressions are amongst the most beloved foods of the country. Moi moi is a savoury steamed pudding made from beans soaked and skinned, ground to a smooth batter, seasoned with onion, ground crayfish, pepper, and red palm oil, then poured into parcels of banana leaf and steamed until set into a soft, dense, fragrant loaf, served alike at weddings, naming ceremonies, and funerals. Akara, its fried counterpart, is the same bean batter whipped light with air and spooned in dollops into hot oil to puff into crisp golden fritters, the universal street breakfast of the region. It was this fritter, carried in the memory and the hands of enslaved Yoruba women across the Atlantic, that became acarajé in Bahia in Brazil, fried in dendê palm oil and split to hold a filling of dried shrimp and pepper, a dish now honoured by UNESCO as an element of Intangible Cultural Heritage. In moi moi and akara, the bean stands at the very centre of Nigerian and Yoruba foodways.
Goa & Punjab, India — c. 1600s
The common bean reached India through the Portuguese trading colony at Goa, which from the early sixteenth century served as the great western gateway through which the New World crops, the chilli, the tomato, the potato, the cashew, and the bean, entered the subcontinent and were absorbed, with astonishing speed and completeness, into a cuisine that would soon seem unimaginable without them. The large red kidney beans of the Andean gene pool travelled north from the coast into the Punjab and the Gangetic plain, where they found their definitive Indian form in rajma: the beans soaked overnight and then simmered long and slow in a thick, deeply spiced gravy of onion, tomato, ginger, garlic, and the warm northern garam masala until the sauce turns rich and the beans grow creamy within. Eaten with plain boiled rice as rajma-chawal, it is one of the great comfort foods of northern India, the Sunday lunch of countless Punjabi households and a fixture of the dhaba and the home kitchen alike. It is important to mark that rajma is a dish of Phaseolus vulgaris, the American bean, and is quite distinct from dal, the everyday dish of the lentils and split pulses of the Lens and Vigna genera that India had cultivated for thousands of years before any American bean arrived; the two coexist on the Indian table as cousins from opposite sides of the world.
Sichuan, China — c. 1620s
The American common bean reached China in the early seventeenth century, carried both along the overland trade routes from the west and by sea to the southern ports, where it entered one of the world's oldest and most sophisticated legume cultures. China had cultivated and revered beans for millennia, above all the soybean, and had built an entire edifice of foods upon the fermenting of pulses, so the newcomer was fitted without difficulty into existing ways of cooking, stir-fried whilst young and green, braised when dried, and added to the long-simmered dishes of the household. It is worth a careful distinction here, for the bean traditions of China are easily confused: the famous fermented chilli bean paste of Sichuan, doubanjiang, the very soul of Sichuan cooking, is made not from the American bean at all but from the broad or fava bean (Vicia faba), an entirely separate genus native to the Near East and grown in China for many centuries, fermented with chillies into the deep red, savoury paste that flavours mapo tofu and twice-cooked pork. The American P. vulgaris took its quieter place alongside these ancient East Asian beans, one more thread woven into a vast and venerable fabric of bean cookery rather than, as in Europe or West Africa, a transforming arrival.
Japan — c. 1650s
The American bean came to Japan in a manner recorded with unusual precision, attached to a single famous name. In 1654 the Chinese Zen master Ingen Ryūki, founder of the Ōbaku school of Japanese Buddhism, crossed from Ming China to Japan, and tradition holds that he brought with him the runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus, the close Mesoamerican relative of the common bean), which was named in his honour ingen-mame, 'Ingen's bean', a name it bears to this day. The common bean itself followed through the ongoing trade conducted at Nagasaki, the one window held open during Japan's long seclusion. In the Japanese kitchen the green pods of the ingen are most often blanched and dressed in goma-ae, a sauce of ground toasted sesame sweetened with a little sugar and soy, a quiet and elegant side dish of the everyday table. Here too a careful distinction is owed, for the beloved sweet red bean of Japanese confectionery, the filling of countless cakes and the body of the warm soup zenzai, is not the American bean at all but the azuki (Vigna angularis), a wholly separate East Asian genus with a history of some four thousand years on the archipelago, long predating any bean from across the Pacific. The two traditions sit side by side on the Japanese table, alike in name alone.
