The Sweet Bean

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[Jenna Silverbirch]

A hobbit lass creeps into a cavernous ante-chamber of the Herbarium. In one hand is a torch, and in the other, her arm wrapped tight around it, is a small pot from which grows a delicate shoot. She brushes the dirt from herself, and glances around, wary. Huzzah! I have braved all the toothed and poisoned and flailing and downright disturbing monstrosities of the Herbarium to bring you this, santharia's answer to the jelly bean! I just need to find out how it reproduces. Triumphant, she places the bean on a podium near the room's centre and scuttles out once more. From the passage she left by comes a sharp snap and then a low disgruntled grunt, as if something had closed its jaws around potential prey and found only air. Swiftly after can be heard the patter of small bare feet making a decidedly speedy exit.

Changes in delightful teal

The Sweet Bean

Categorization
Edible plants > Cultivated plants and Vegetables

Basic Overview of the Plant
An unusual plant grown primarily in the Dogodan shire and imported throughout Santharia, the Sweet Bean is, as the name should make obvious, an ordinary bean plant to all extents- except that it grows beans with an undeniably sugary taste.

Description
The plant is an unassuming one, resembling an ordinary bean plant. One might enter any neat hobbit garden and see a row of Sweet Beans between the other bean plants, normally twining itself around a cone of canes and mesh, or a wall lattice. The plants can grow to two peds, though are rarely strong enough, and a ped and a fore is a more common length. From the earth beneath the canes emerge thin green stems perhaps less than two nails breadths wide - though they are thick compared to the rest for the plant - each one an individual plant, rather than a separate stem from the same root. This stem will, once strong enough, wind itself around the nearest method of support, growing in spirals. The leaves are delicate and grey tinged, flecked with purple on the top side of the leaf. These leaves extend the whole length of the stem, between which grow spindly creepers. These offshoots, beginning as no more than hair-like curls, thicken, elongate, and eventually grow to grasp onto the nearest object they can feasibly clasp. Without support such as the normal hobbit-garden cane structure, the plant can grow and wild species have been observed to wrap themselves around other plants, in the Alianian hills, but such specimens are normally stunted and are easily snapped.

The flowers, which eventually develop into bean pods, are as flimsy-looking as the leaves. They posses a flattened flower about six nailsbredths in length, and an elongated stigma from which the curiously stretched petals hardly open, or cover.  Their frailty might have given them a pathetic air if their colouring had been as weak, but the sweet-bean flowers grow to display a beautiful array of colour. Most common is a deep purple hue, speckled with light pink around the base, or a strong yellow flower tinged with black. Plain red, and orange flowers are also in existence, but are rarer as they are generally thought to be less beautiful.

Then there are the beans themselves. The pods are thick and stumpy, coloured a darker green than the rest of the plant and covered, somewhat randomly, with the same purple specks found on the leaves. Each contains six to nine beans. These are shorter than most bean varieties, measuring two nailsbreadths by a nails breadth and half and thus being almost spherical, and in the regular Alian bean variety (those with purple flowers) are a strikingly bright shade of amethyst, covered with purple flecks that concentrate thicker at the point where the bean was attached to it’s pod. Their skin is delicate for a bean and inside, the flesh is just as soft.

The beans are remarkable in that they are very sweet. Their taste has been liked to the Fáberige, and while the two are both deliciously sweet, the Sweet Bean is even more sugary, and has a chewier texture.
Each of the four main varieties of plant produce beans of slightly different flavours.
-Alian Beans The purple-flowering plants are the oldest species, and have the most sugary, softest beans.

-Sunshine Beans The yellow-flowered, yellow-fleshed beans give a more mellow flavour with an almost Kao-Kao like aftertaste. Because of these bitter notes they are generally agreed to be the best beans to cook, and the variety least popular amongst children.

-Eradoc’s Bean Named after their Whittercorn breeder, the orange flowered plants have beans of plain orange colour, and a delicate, perfumed taste. As many have remarked, ‘They taste almost like a flower smells.’

-Trubenan Beans Named with a probable corruption of Truban because of their supposedly exotic flavour, the red flowering plant produces a golden-red, copper coloured bean. Their taste is hard to describe. Though most hobbits will tell you they are a spicy bean, the strong aftertaste and tingling sensation left by the beans is still quite sugary and far more fragrant than any savoury spiced foodstuff.

Territory
The sweet bean grows well in any temperate clime. It has been grown in northern and southern Santharia, but generally prefers the conditions of the central parts of the kingdom. Hence its origin in the mild weather of the Alianian hills, where Dogodan hobbits first cultivated the wild specimens found there.

Usages
The plant is grown partly for its pretty blossoms, in and outside of the Dogodan shire. Dogodan hobbits in particular are charmed by the bean’s elegant blossoms and love to cultivate them. Indeed, you can often hear a hobbit remark when talking of a fragile beauty- “She’s a fair bean-flower, she is.” This is not, it should be said, a very desirable look amongst hobbits.

But of course, the bean’s irresistible sweet taste lend themselves to another of the hobbit’s favourite things: eating and cooking. The beans can be eaten straight from the pod, and tricksy sweet-toothed youngsters often raid a well stocked bean-garden for a few pods of tasty beans. Certainly, around the rest of Santharia, raw, they are a popular treat for children, and indulgence for adults. The hobbits are the main race to use them in dishes. Whether seasoned and eaten raw as a pre-pudding snack, or used as a garnish for a cake, or cooked in a ‘pudden’ all-year pie, or another dessert dish, the hobbit’s love and creativity when using these unusual beans is unbounded.

The beans are also used to create a small variety of sweeteners that are unusual and expensive, and thus rather treasured by artisan chefs.  These are only produced professionally and on a scale large enough to be worth selling, by a handful of farming families in the Dogodan shire, who closely guard the intricacies of their individual sweetener-creating methods. It was difficult enough for your researcher to learn the basics of each sweetener’s creation, let alone the secrets that make each family’s concoction unique. The three basic kinds of sweetener listed below can, of course, be made with a multitude of different bean combinations, as well as the basic four varieties, some rarer and some far more standard. All are in high demand across Santharia, as the delicacy and strength of flavour produced is very unique. Only a tiny amount of sweetener is needed to sweeten a dish, yet the huge amount of beans needed to make a very small amount of sweetener means they are one of the most expensive and valued spices in Sarvonia. (Except in the shires, where any family with the odd bean plant in their garden may produce a ladle of unrefined, unprofessional powder or syrup when they so desire it.)

-Crystal-Bean A crystallised sweetener made in a rainbow of colours, not unlike the spice foridite. To make it, beans are crushed to pulp, then boiled for a short time, sometimes with various spices or herbs, so a lump of soft, almost syrup like, pure bean-flesh is left. The bean skin will have formed lumps and skeins of flesh around the actual sweetener, and must be removed. Then, the purified bean flesh is frozen for a few days in an ice house, and finally ground to crystalline grains, or fine sand-textured powder, depending on the finer details of the process, and the bean variety.
-Bean Syrup Like a more delicate and liquid maple syrup, this sweetener is generally used as a sauce to pour over dishes, rather than an ingredient in them. As with crystal-bean, the beans are crushed, but are boiled for far longer. Eventually, the bean flesh forms s liquid, which is filtered and reboiled varying times to thicken it t the creator’s preferred strength. Your author believes that professional bean-squishers (as they jokingly call themselves) then appear to also use a curious device of gnomish design, called a water-gatherer, after basic boiling and skin extraction.. It is somewhat cone-shaped, and is placed over a boiling pan. We were not allowed to inspect this apparatus in detail, but have been told that it collects water escaping in the air from the pan in an ice-filled compartment at its top, which is then used to make essence of bean.
-Essence of Bean In a very curious process, a few bean-squishers have been known to ferment beans in large clay urns, with a mix of seasoning and sweeteners that seems to mainly consist of yeast, and that family’s secret recipit. The exact processes are unknown, but the final product is a rich and tangy liquid.

Reproduction
The bean is a hardy plant when kept in the right conditions, though in frosty or very hot climes it will not over winter, or live past producing beans. Around the month of the Changing Winds the bean begins to grow strong again, and blossoms. Once the flowers are fertilised by the Malise, over the summer the flowers will grow into bean pods. By the month of the Sleeping Dreameress, and into Fallen leaf and sometimes Passing Clouds, the bean is ready to be harvested. Over the winter it dies back a little, though still retains some shoots and all of its roots.
One simply has to plant a bean and cultivate it well to grow a new bean plant, and the hobbits dry great quantities of the beans over the winter so they may plant them the next spring.

Origins
A few centuries back, the bean was but another wild plant in the fertile Alianian hills. Hobbits, having before overlooked the bean because of its tough pods and prickly stems, began to see the potential in the unusually chewy, if also unusually sweet, beans, to make a delicious vegetable with the taste of a fruit. It is uncertain exactly who first began to cultivate the beans, but the prominent and ancient gardening hobbit household of Whittercorn (believed to be a corruption of white acorn) has certainly been most involved in breeding the tangled wild beans to become the neat bushes so common in hobbit gardens. Currently, Dalferia Whittercorn is carrying on her families traditions by breeding ever more exotic flavours of sweet bean.

[Bard Judith]

Can the natural sugars of the bean be extracted, perhaps not as the white sand we moderns are familiar with, but as a thick golden syrup that can be crystalized,  or as coarse brownish translucent flakes, or something equally cool and medieval?  Because at the moment all our receipts have as available sweeteners is Malisehoney or some of that expensive imported Krath stuff.....   would be nice to have a 'dry' sweetener that would be more portable and easily stored than honey....

[Ta'lia of the Seven Jewels]

Mmmm,

-Trubenan Beans Named with a probable corruption of Truban because of there supposedly exotic flavour, the red flowering plant produces a golden-red, copper coloured bean. Their taste is hard to describe. Though most hobbits will tell you they are a spicy bean, the strong aftertaste and tingling sensation left by the beans is still quite sugary and far more fragrant than any savoury spiced foodstuff.

Thank you!

Judy, I think you are not here often enough.. how could you, as one of our cooks,  forget our "brown sugar", crystallised?

Foridus is grown for the sole purpose of producing Foridite, a common spice used in baking sweets and flavoring fruit dishes. When the Foridus blooms, the stalk is cut and the sap extracted. Farmers typically do this by pressing between two peeled logs. Wealthy Foridus merchants use worked stone rollers manufactured by the dwarves, as more sap can be extracted with the heavier pressing. Whatever material is used has no impact upon the taste.

The sap is thick and sticky, with a cinnamon smell and taste. Straight from the plant, it can be used as a liquid (Foridus Juice), but it is more commonly frozen into a hard crystal, which is then ground into a powder and allowed to thaw and dry. By doing so, it becomes Foridite, ready for use.

Foridus

I think I need to introduce the sugar beet to Northern Sarvonia....  at least do a proposal!

[Jenna Silverbirch]

Excellent idea, Judith! I'll get right on it and research (and partly invent ) some ways a sweetener could be extracted and made into a dry substance.

EDIT: Oh, and Talia- I suppose it couldn't hurt to have another, less common sweetener around.

[Ta'lia of the Seven Jewels]

Yes, of course - is it a flavoured sugar then? Different flavours? Different colours? I need to read the entire submission!

You could compare your sugar with the more common foridite. Or find another easy to use form than crystals.

I was asking myself in the beginning, if you had the red bean in mind which the Japanese use as a chocolate replacement. But I don't even know, if they sweeten their red bean paste or if it comes like this.

[Jenna Silverbirch]

I haven't got as far as writing of the sweetener, as Judith only just suggested it- but thanks for the suggestions- they're quite helpful!

I was vaguely inspired by the red bean (though I think it's sweetend it first)! Primary inspiration came from seeing, a a few months ago , my mother podding beans (and I forget which variety they actually were ) that were bubblegum pink and speckled with purple. I suddenly thought that with a colour like that, you'd expect them to taste sweet, and voilà, this entry was born in my head.

EDIT: I've found another possible sweetener, quite by accident, while reading through the alianian hills entry- the maple, which the entry refers to as being used to make syrup.

[Jenna Silverbirch]

*bumpity bump*
Huzzah! I have finally got round to adding a section on sweet bean sweeteners.

Anyone got any comments?

[seth ghibta]

hi Jenna! i read this through a while back and thought it was brilliant - my mum grows the same beans, i think. being a defiant non-appreciator of broad beans in all their assorted colours, i always wished they tasted half as good as they looked. and now (in Santharia, at least) they do!
any corrections/ suggestions i can think of will be in the usual yellow.

The Sweet Bean

Categorization
Edible plants > Cultivated plants and Vegetables

Basic Overview of the Plant
An unusual plant grown primarily in the Dogodan shire and imported throughout Santharia, the Sweet Bean is, as the name should make obvious, an ordinary bean plant to all extents- except that it grows beans with an undeniably sugary taste.

Description
The plant is an unassuming one, resembling an ordinary bean plant. One might enter any neat hobbit garden and see a row of Sweet Beans between the other bean plants, normally twining itself around a cone of canes and mesh, or a wall lattice. The plants can grow to two peds, though are rarely strong enough, and a ped and a fore is a more common length. From the earth beneath the canes emerge thin green stems perhaps less than two nails breadths wide - though they are thick compared to the rest for the plant - each one an individual plant, rather than a separate stem from the same root. This stem will, once strong enough, wind itself around the nearest method of support, growing in spirals. The leaves are delicate and grey tinged, flecked with purple on the top side of the leaf. These leaves extend the whole length of the stem, between which grow spindly creepers. These offshoots, beginning as no more than hair-like curls, thicken, elongate, and eventually grow to grasp onto the nearest object they can feasibly clasp. Without support such as the normal hobbit-garden cane structure, the plant can grow and wild species have been observed to wrap themselves around other plants, in the Alianian hills, but such specimens are normally stunted and are easily snapped.

The flowers, which eventually develop into bean pods, are as flimsy-looking as the leaves. They posses a flattened flower about six nailsbredths in length, and an elongated stigma from which the curiously stretched petals hardly open, or cover.  Their frailty might have given them a pathetic air if their colouring had been as weak, but the sweet-bean flowers grow to display a beautiful array of colour. Most common is a deep purple hue, speckled with light pink around the base, or a strong yellow flower tinged with black. Plain red, and orange flowers are also in existence, but are rarer as they are generally thought to be less beautiful.

Then there are the beans themselves. The pods are thick and stumpy, coloured a darker green than the rest of the plant and covered, somewhat randomly, with the same purple specks found on the leaves. Each contains six to nine beans. These are shorter than most bean varieties, measuring two nailsbreadths by a nailsbreadth and half and thus being almost spherical, and in the regular Alian bean variety (those with purple flowers) are a strikingly bright shade of amethyst, covered with purple flecks that concentrate thicker at the point where the bean was attached to it’s pod. Their skin is delicate for a bean and inside, the flesh is just as soft.
[...]
-Crystal-Bean A crystallised sweetener made in a rainbow of colours, not unlike the spice foridite. To make it, beans are crushed to pulp, then boiled for a short time, sometimes with various spices or herbs, so a lump of soft, almost syrup like, pure bean-flesh is left. The bean skin will have formed lumps and skeins of flesh around the actual sweetener, and must be removed. Then, the purified bean flesh is frozen for a few days in an ice house, and finally ground to crystalline grains, or fine sand-textured powder, depredating<depending? on the finer details of the process, and the bean variety.
-Bean Syrup Like a more delicate and liquid maple syrup, this sweetener is generally used as a sauce to pour over dishes, rather than an ingredient in them. As with crystal-bean, the beans are crushed, but are boiled for far longer. Eventually, the bean flesh forms s liquid, which is filtered and reboiled varying times to thicken it t the creator’s preferred strength. Your author believes that professional bean-squishers (as they jokingly call themselves) then appear to also use a curious device called a water-gatherer after basic boiling and skin extraction.. It is somewhat cone-shaped, and is placed over a boiling pan. We were not allowed to inspect this apparatus in detail, but have been told that it collects water escaping in the air from the pan in an ice-filled compartment at its’<its top, which is then used to make essence of bean.
-Essence of Bean In a very curious process, a few bean-squishers have been known to ferment beans in large clay urns, with a mix of seasoning and sweeteners that seems to mainly consist of yeast, and that family’s secret recipit. The exact processes are unknown, but the final product is a rich and tangy liquid.
nice one Jenna - this works really well - as you can see i could barely find anything to comment on - just tiny grammar thingies. i dunno if you noticed, but i've already refernced your bean in the wopse entry. actually, that's a point - while i was reading this i remembered a terran story about beans - iwas wondering if it'd work if tharianized, and obviously these are the clear candidte for replacing them. hmmm... this will require some thought...

[Ta'lia of the Seven Jewels]

-Essence of Bean In a very curious process, a few bean-squishers have been known to ferment beans in large clay urns, with a mix of seasoning and sweeteners that seems to mainly consist of yeast, and that family’s secret recipit. The exact processes are unknown, but the final product is a rich and tangy liquid.

I'm glad you had not the idea to make natto! 

[Jenna Silverbirch]

Lol, Talia, it's sweet natto, essentially

Oh, seth, I'm so glad you like it! And I must have been sloppy reading that wonderful wopse entry- how could I miss a reference? Yah, broad beans are okay, but definitely not the nicest kind. Now we can enjoy them! (in our minds, in santharia, that is)

Thanks for the corrections! One always seems to miss a few things, no matter how many times you read a piece through.

Ooh! What is this story about beans? Perhaps I know it already... and I'd love it if my beans guest starred in a santharianization of it You'll write it excellently, I'm certain.

[seth ghibta]

it's an anansi story - i've been trying to find my copy of it, but i must have mislaid it for now. basically, anansi wants his wife's bean harvest all to himself, so he pretends to be dying, and asks to be buried by the bean patch, and every night his wife must put a pot on to boil as an offering to the spirits. so every night he sneaks to feast on beans. eventually she cottons on, and makes a tarbaby to guard the beans. Anansi gets in a fight with it, and in the morning she finds him stuck fast.
d'you reckon that'd work? i thought there'd be no treat more fitting than your sweet beans for the story.

[Jenna Silverbirch]

Ah, good old Anasi...I do love trickster stories Now, that sounds incredibly familiar! The tar baby part in particular is nudging at some old memory somewhere in my head.
I think it'd definitely work, and you'd handle it brilliantly! So yup, go ahead- I'd love you to write it. 

[Rookie Brownbark]

Oooo, what's a tar baby?  Sounds very cool and mythic.

Also great to see the hobbits getting some more yummy food!

[Deklitch Hardin]

ooh ... tar babies!

They are babies made out of tar from the Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox stories, used by one to trick the other ... one of them (I think it is the rabbit) almost always comes out on top. Basically it is used to trap people onto it when they try to do something they shouldn't.

That is only my memory of them anyway ... and it is possible that I've got the incorrect animals and haven't used the correct spellings in places.

Dek

[Jenna Silverbirch]

Yup, that's right, Dek - the name is pretty literal, huh? They appear in various versions of the anansi stories, which brer rabbit is essentially a later form of.

And seth looky looky> A quick google search unearthed this huge list of anansi stories for your browsing convenience

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