BEANS

Well - for the moment at least - here comes summer. Or, perhaps more accurately, here comes summer again. For I seem to remember the first month of summer being quite respectable. Indeed the enamelled reproduction of a French nineteenth century thermometre recorded about 30 degrees against the cool shady wall of our front door - as high as that late summer of a few years ago when the good people in Gravesend found themselves privileged to melt, in a record temperature of over 100ºF.

At any rate I was watering the garden then virtually everyday so the last month of almost continuous rain has provided some relief, if only to my water bill.

Now with the re-arrival of the sunshine I shall have to start watering again! Not that I completely ever stopped watering, even in the rain, for I have a tub full of runner beans growing against a wooden fence and close to the north-east facing gable wall of the house. Hardly a propitious position, I thought, when I decided this was the only spot I had left to put them, but then you never really know until you try.

This peculiar location is sheltered from the south-westerly rains by the house and from anything else by an enormous flowering currant bush. Nevertheless the bean tendrils have crept skywards, first up poles and then up odd pieces of string and are now busy cropping furiously all over the roof of the shed. They lie though in a rain shadow so the leaves are perpetually curling up and sagging and I have to go out incongruously in the pouring rain to water them.

You can, according to the 1970s self-sufficiency guru John Seymour, feed a family of four for a year on an acre of beans. I always find this a useful thing to know and regularly retail the information at parties when the conversation turns yet again to house prices or the prospects for the next football season. Nor do I imagine that were you an inventive cook your family would ever be bored, so many and varied are the different types of the family leguminosae.

But, seriously, a pea, eaten fresh from its pod, ripe and succulent, is one of the great tastes of nature; then there’s houmous and dahl, made from wonderful lentils and chick peas. These are at least honorary beans. Soy beans, of course, keep you young, containing as they do all sorts of phyto-hormones to keep you healthy and stop your hair and teeth falling out.

And even without their accompaniment of white sauce young broad beans are so tender and tasty as to make you feel you could live on them forever. But why deprive yourself of white sauce when beans will give you both flour and an acceptable range of dairy substitutes if you speak to them nicely?

Although I have had the fortune to be a quarter of a fine family of four I have never, fortunately or unfortunately, possessed an acre of land and so have never been able to put the John Seymour theory to the test. For the last 18 years I have indeed possessed only something the size of a large pocket handkerchief and therefore my bean production has been accordingly curtailed.

I do though produce sufficient beans to provide for a dish that has become a semi-signature; one that I first learned to cook one French summer in a rather bohemian establishment (the police where always turning up in Inspector Clouseau-like wagons with corrugated sides; while on the hall table stood a handy bowl of condoms in the sort of position where other residential establishments might have offered Imperial mints). It tastes particularly good outdoors on a summer evening, the cooked beans now appropriately watered by a light crisp or sparkling wine.

Once I cooked this dish for 80 students at another bohemian establishment this time in Norway, where Younger Daughter was undertaking some species of charitable training prior to being sent to build latrines in darkest Mozambique, where she caught but thankfully survived malaria. She came home safely, though minus her hair, sacrificed to the mosquitoes presumably.

Indeed so bohemian was this establishment that I ended up playing competitive hockey for Denmark (against the United Kingdom), something that I don’t think I ever did before, or since. I blame it on a £5 Ryanair ticket to Aarhus.

But you have, I know, even less interest than I do in hockey. You are waiting for the recipe. So here we go! The dish is called ‘Madame Martin’s Beans’, she being the eponymous patronne of the establishment the police were so interested in. When she was not catering for her visitors her métier was that of a family planning counsellor so her bowl of condoms were merely a sign of her stock-in trade.

The dish should be a big dish, big as you like. Imagine a heaped and steaming bowl, like a paella but without the mussels and crayfish entrails. It's mainly potatoes - par-boiled and then cut small and sautéed in butter. You can use any old potatoes, you don’t have to use your best quality, waxy Charlottes. It doesn’t matter if they crumble. Anyway you sauté the potatoes in a big hot pan with a lot of garlic (the key word is lot) and other herbs like rosemary and majoram. Add plenty of sea salt, of course, and black pepper. Don’t add the herbs or garlic too early or they will just burn up.

Now add your beans, about a quarter or a third by weight compared with the potatoes. They should be green beans - runners, or sliced haricots verts. These cook quickly and can be cooked by stirring them into the sauté-ing potatoes. Don’t over cook them. Al-dente is excellent, but this is a most forgiving dish that absolutely anyone can cook.

And then serve. That’s all! Hot filling and tasty - what more could you want. And you still don’t want to live for a year on an acre of beans?