Magic Beans: The Sequel

Posted on November 29, 2025

Keen readers of this blog, if there are any, might remember that I have some great black runner beans.

Obviously I planted some more this year. Not that I really needed to, because runner beans are a perennial, growing from a tuber, and indeed the vines from last year’s tuber are way more vigorous than the ones from the beans I planted a month or two ago, even though the shoots came up at the same time.

Anyway now that I have plants going this season, I can safely eat the beans I saved from last season. Unfortunately one jar spoiled, probably through not drying them off properly, but I have another jar with a couple of hundred grams of beans.

In 1970s New Zealand, dried runner beans were a teaching aid at primary school. I remember jars of the common pink and black ones being used in counting exercises. And we ate the green pods. But no one ate the beans themselves, dried beans of any kind not being part of our cuisine, so there was nothing to do with them but throw them away or give them to kids to play with… but these things are gold I’m telling you. In the US Rancho Gordo is selling dried black runner beans (“ayocote morado”) for US $7.50/lb, which I think is NZ $28/kg?

To cut a long story short, I just tried a little batch to see how they would turn out, and the answer is, they are mild flavoured, more like lima beans than anything else, keeping their shape well, and with a delightful creamy texture. I fried some onion in olive oil and stirred in the beans with some of the cooking liquid and herbs. I absolutely will cook the rest and look forward to deliberately drying some of this year’s crop.

Runner beans are a species in their own right. Plenty of people and cultures eat the dried beans: Greeks have fasoulia gigantes, Austrians have Käferbohnen, and the OG indigenous cultivators grow ayocotl. But for whatever reason, dried runner beans are not a commercial crop, unlike the dried beans of Phaseolus vulgaris whose many varieties we find dried or tinned in shops. There’s a nice piece here expanding on this from a gardener in Oregon who also decided to eat her excess runner beans dried.

Obviously being me I can’t go past the Jewish angle: in Spanish dried runner beans are called Judiónes, which is to say big Judias, and both those names seem plausibly connected to Jews. In fact there are folk etymologies suggesting that beans are named after Jews because of how dried bean dishes are associated with Shabbat, beans being very suited to long slow cooking you can start in a hot oven on Friday night and still eat warm on Saturday for lunch. Some suggest that no, it’s from an Arabic word for bean… or is it?

Tags: gardening, food, happiness, beans

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