North America · Volume 34, The Hollow, the Ridge and the Mill Town
Leather Britches Beans
Appalachia, United States
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 3 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
As tradition built it
Leather Britches Beans
Serves 4. About 3 hours, once dried.
Ingredients
- 300g leather britches (dried whole green bean pods), or fresh half-runner beans strung and hung for a season
- 150g fatback or a piece of country ham
- 1 small onion, sliced
- to cover water to cover
- to taste salt, to taste
Method
- Soak the leather britches, the dried beans, overnight in plenty of water.
- Drain, cover with fresh water, and add the fatback and onion.
- Simmer gently for about 3 hours, topping up with water as needed, until the beans are fully tender and the pot liquor has taken on the meat's flavour.
- Season with salt toward the end. Serve with cornbread and sliced raw onion, exactly as soup beans are served.
What a modern chef changes
The drying step engineered for reliability, the flavour it builds treated as the point rather than a side effect of preservation.
Rung 2
Method
- Dry fresh whole green beans in a dehydrator at a low setting, roughly 50°C, for 12 to 18 hours, rather than string-drying over weeks, replicating the slow enzymatic concentration that gives leather britches their depth in a fraction of the time and with a controlled, repeatable result.
- Rehydrate and cook the beans sous vide with the fatback at 85°C for 3 hours, sealed with the cooking liquid, then reduce the bag liquor separately to finish as a sauce, keeping every trace of the flavour the drying step built rather than losing it to an open pot.