The derek cooper award
This month, out of the blue and marvellously, Ruth and I became the proud recipients of one of the BBC Food Programme’s Food and Farming Awards; to wit, “the Derek Cooper Award for Outstanding Achievement”. It is a great honour and a great fillip. Derek was a fine writer and a grand man, who founded the Food Programme in 1979 and became its first ever presenter
The award was presented at a very pleasant gathering in Bristol by Sheila Dillon, who produced the Food Programme in Derek’s day and is now the presenter, and by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. Sheila very kindly referred to one of my books, which was called Future Cook in Britain and Future Food in America. She said she read the American version in New York in the year of its publication – way back in 1980, when she was starting out as a food writer — and was significantly influenced by it. She singled out the chapter on beans – which, for old time’s sake, we have reproduced below.
Now I see the chapter as a period piece. It was after all written nearly 50 years ago and the world has been transformed since then – especially I would say by the growth of IT and the easy spread of ideas, nowadays augmented by AI. In my early scribbling days to find things out you still had to gain access to specialist libraries with specialist books and journals and go to conferences and visit appropriate authorities wherever they might be while now, at least in theory, we all have access to all the world’s scholarship and scholars without leaving our desks (or indeed our armchairs). Amazing. This I suggest is the upside of the Anthropocene.
There have been significant changes in nutritional theory too – paradigm shifts indeed. In particular the idea has grown that nutrition is largely an exercise in symbiosis between the hosts and the microbes in their gut. Nutritional science has thus emerged in large part as a branch of ecology.
Also of huge significance I suggest is the idea of cryptonutrients, as discussed in my blog of March 14 2023 – ‘The absolute importance of “Cryptonutrients” and why “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. But Future Cook (alias Future Food) and others led up to my grand realisation that everything we need to know about food can be summarised in the nine-word slogan:
“Plenty of plants, not much meat, and maximum variety”
So it emerges that there is a near-perfect one-to-one correspondence between agroecology, modern nutritional theory, and the world’s finest cuisines cooking. In other words, all most of us really need to do is to re-learn how to cook.
But that’s more than enough preamble.
Here’s the chapter. Old-fashioned – but still very pertinent. And in a separate post, the accompanying recipes.
BEANS BY MANY OTHER NAMES
Pulses have good qualities and bad qualities; but their bad qualities are largely, although not entirely, in the imagination and their beneficence is so overwhelming that they must take their place at the heart of human nutrition and gastronomy, as they have in many cultures for the past 10,000 years.
They must do so, however, in their pristine form, as peas and beans and lentils and chick-peas and grams; not as the appalling ersatz “textured vegetable protein”, or TVP, that has suddenly become the basis of a boom industry. Their texture needs no improvement and their versatility is infinite, without the intercession of high technology.
The bad things first. Pulses are the large and meaty seeds of plants of the worldwide and highly successful Leguminosae group**; but the Leguminosae (Fabaceae) share with the Solanaceae, provider of the potato and tomato, a proclivity for playing nasty tricks. Thus one of the potato’s relatives is Atropabelladonna,the deadly nightshade; and one of the Leguminosae is the laburnum, whose seeds can have extremely unpleasant effects, as can those of some of the lupins.
** The Leguminosae is now called the Fabaceae, in line with the ruling that all plant family names should end in –aceae. But the individual types are still at least informally called “legumes”
The potato itself can be poisonous; many of the primitive, wild forms certainly are and even the modern cultivars become toxic if they are exposed to light and allowed to become green. Similarly, some of the pulses that people eat have at times done them harm, and in a variety of ways. A severe form of anaemia, which occurs in Mediterranean countries and is known as favism, is thought to be caused by eating too many broad beans; the big-seeded jack bean has poisoned people; and paralysing lathyrism can result from overconsumption of the grass pea, Lathyrus sativus — although people do not normally eat this pulse except in times of famine. Much less serious (although they irritate some people) are the oligosaccharides (complex sugars) that are contained in many pulses and which escape digestion by the enzymes produced in the gut. The bacteria in the large bowel ferment the un-changed oligosaccharides to produce socially embarrassing barrage balloon volumes of carbonaceous gas of the kind that was once used to fire street-lamps.
Snobbery surrounds the pulses; they have been despised largely because they have been one of the standbys of poor people. The word pulse comes from the Latin puts, meaning pudding. Yet some of the reservations were justified in the past, before there were plant breeders and toxicologists to develop safe varieties. The Greeks recognised their debt to the broad bean, Vicia faba,and offered bean feasts to Apollo; but, in words that I regret must remain anonymous (because I don’t have the reference), “Beans be damned by Pythagoras, for it is said, that by oft use thereof the wits are dulled and cause many dreams, for dead men’s souls be therein.”
Yet the agricultural, nutritional and gastronomic advantages of pulses are profound, and the old suspicions should be encouraged to die. As crops; pulses have three advantages. First, they are not grasses, and they therefore do not share the diseases of cereals and other grasses. The leafy leguminous species — alfalfa, sainfoin and the clovers and vetches — have therefore often been grown in the wetter areas to complement grass, as a break crop or in a mixture. The legumes grown for their seeds — the pulses — similarly may alternate with the grasses that are grown for their seeds (the cereals). Indeed, grains and pulses are a grand little knock-about team; they grow together, or side by side, and they can with advantage be eaten together.
Second, the legumes, which are not unique but are at least outstanding among plants, fertilise themselves. They have bacteria – Rhizobium — living symbiotically in little nodules in their roots; and these bacteria fix atmospheric nitrogen, which means they capture the somewhat uninteresting gas that makes up four-fifths of the atmosphere and form it into soluble nitrates and nitrites, which are the chief plant food. In practice, Western farmers put additional fertiliser on to pulse crops; but legumes can grow on astonishingly unfertile soil and leave it more fertile than they found it.
Third, the legumes are almost as versatile as the grasses. Some, such as the groundnut, or peanut, and in particular the Bambara groundnut, Vigna subterranea, of West Africa (named after a district in Mali), can grow in virtual desert; and others, like the tepary bean of Central America and Arizona (Phaseolus acutifolius) produce a crop after the most miserly shower. Other pulses, such as the runner bean, like wet conditions. Some kinds, the pigeon pea for example, one of the most valued crops in India, are tropical; others, like soya, are unhappy in a climate that is less than Mediterranean. But a few types, notably the broad bean, are among the hardiest crops known to agriculture.
Nutritionally, the pulses are perhaps the most desirable of all simple foods. Raw haricots provide about 250 Calories for every 100 grams — which makes them about three times as calorific as potatoes; although by the time they have swollen in cooking, the calorie value per unit weight is roughly equal to that of the potato. But the haricot also contains 25 per cent fibre, so it would be hard to get fat on a diet of haricots; and it provides 20 per cent protein, which is easily in excess of human needs. Furthermore, the protein of haricots — indeed of all beans — is rich in lysine, which is the essential amino acid most likely to be deficient in grain protein. Hence grain protein and pulse protein together meet human requirements more exactly than either alone; and it is at least a happy accident that the grain-with-pulse theme is so prominent and so popular in all the world’s cuisines, as dhal with rice in India, kidney beans and tortillas in Mexico, beans on toast in England, or rice and soya in China.
Only two obstructions (besides prejudice) stand between the cook and the pulse. The first is that pulses are dried seeds and although some, such as lentils, can be cooked without further preparation, the bigger and harder beans need pre-soaking, which means that the cook needs to think ahead.
The second impediment is the nomenclature. Pulses have a host of names not only because there are many different kinds but because different people name them for different purposes. The botanists give them names that reflect their ancestry; the plant breeders name their new creations like racehorses; the farmers’ names describe the places they grow and the things for which they can be used; and the market gardeners tend to give them names that reflect their form. Cooks are interested mainly in shape and size, and retailers, these days, faced with a mass of pulses imported from the ends of the earth, sometimes pluck names out of the air. The beans now growing in my garden could be called Phaseolus vulgaris, The Prince, kidney beans, dwarf beans or French beans, depending on whether they were being sold, grown, eaten or bequeathed to the botany school.
This proliferation would not be quite so bad if the names were consistent, but only the scientists’ Latinesque inventions and, to a lesser extent, the breeders’ names, enjoy formal and universal recognition. Thus when an American farmer talks of horse beans he generally means Canavalia gladiata, which is also called the sword bean, and sometimes the jack bean; although jack bean usually refers to the related Canavalia ensiformis. But the British horse bean is Vicia faba,alias the tic bean or field bean, which is a variety of the species that also includes the broad bean. Again, the pigeon pea (Cajanus) is not related to the English green pea (Pisum), the asparagus pea (Lotus), the chick-pea (Cicer) or the cow-pea (Vigna);and its small round seeds are much favoured in India, where it is called red gram. But green gram, which looks like red gram except for the colour, is Phaseolus aureus,which is a kind of kidney bean, and is sometimes called the mung bean. Phaseolus mungo ought to be called the mung bean, but usually is not. It is called black gram.
The only sure antidote to such confusion is familiarity, through which a bean tastes as pleasant by any other name; but here is a potted guide to the main types.
The pulses that most people call beans come from three main botanical groups: Glycine, the soya bean; Phaseolus, the kidney bean, and Vicia (formerly called Faba), of which the chief is the broad bean.
Glycine, the soya, is one of nature’s most astonishing creations. It is native to Asia, and has been cultivated for thousands of years in China; but it has spread all over the world (there are more than 1,000 varieties) and it is now the second biggest export crop of the United States. The Chinese and Japanese cook it fresh, or dry it, or turn it into bean curd, or ferment it to make soy sauce and miso (soya bean paste). They make flour from it and a kind of milk, and use it as one of several sources of bean sprouts. The ancient Chinese could not have known that soya’s protein content — up to 40 per cent — was as high as that of meat; but it kept them alive none the less.
The soya is not a bad bean, but its merits have been greatly exaggerated, mainly by agribusinessmen from the United States who have been growing it for decades for its oil, and now are using the alleged and hypothetical protein gap (see below) as a pretext for selling it as human food. In truth there is no specific protein gap, so there is no reason for growing one specific high-protein food. There is no good reason either for any country which does not traditionally grow soya, or which has too cool a climate to do so, to import it. The ersatz meat industry, based on soya, is one of this century’s more intriguing confidence tricks and is discussed at the end of this chapter. Because it is oily, soya is excellent when cooked by dry heat in an iron pan or roasted, as are oily groundnuts (peanuts), sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, almonds and oats. Roasted soya makes a good crunchy side dish and, like other oily seeds, can add textural interest when floated on a thick soup But soya’s oiliness makes it one of the most difficult beans to cook, and since Westerners do not actually need the vast amount of protein it contains, I feel Western cooks would be far better advised to use the established and versatile kidney beans and lentils.
The archetypal beans of the West belong to the Phaseolus series: the kidney beans. The outstanding species is Phaseolus vulgaris, native to South America, which includes the range of climbing or dwarf varieties that are grown for their pods — that is, as French beans; and the range (often the same varieties) whose pods are allowed to ripen and whose seeds are then eaten as white, brown, black or multi-coloured haricots. One variety, the navy bean, was made famous by H.J. Heinz of Pittsburgh as the baked bean.
The other big-seeded Phaseolus of note, also native to South America, are Phaseoluscoccineus,the runner bean grown mainly for its pods, and Phaseolus lunatus, the butter bean, or Lima bean, whose large white seeds are the biggest of all the Phaseolus. Phaseoluscoccineus was first cultivated in Britain in the eighteenth century as a decorative creeper. With its scarlet or white flowers (or red and white or pink in some modem cultivars) and slim green pods up to two-thirds of a metre long, it is certainly handsome. In a future, more crowded world, crops that please the eye will be especially desirable.
Vicia faba comes in several forms. The ones eaten by humans are the broad beans, which helped to sustain the civilisations of Greece and Rome (even though the patricians regarded them with suspicion), and they still seem to be grown in every odd corner of southern Italy**. They dry well (just lift the mature plant and hang it up by the roots), but their grey-brown leathery skins take some softening. Broad beans are extremely hardy. They are often sown in autumn, and withstand the winter-and their humbler varieties, tic and field beans, are good animal feed.
** Though I wonder if this is still the case in 2025!
The grams are a mixed bag of small bean-like pulses much favoured by the Indians for making dhal and also for sprouting. Red gram, alias the pigeon pea, or Cajanus cajan, is a perennial shrub (many of the Fabaceae are shrubs or trees) native to Africa. It has become the second most popular pulse in India (after chick-peas) and it is canned in the West Indies. Black gram is another Phaseolus, namely Phaseolus mungo,and it probably originated in India, where it is sometimes called urad.Green gram is Phaseolusaureus,often called by its Indian name of mung and commonly used for sprouts, which are an outstanding emergency source of vitamin C.
The chick-pea, Cicerarietinum,is probably another native of Africa, but it has become the chief pulse of India where, just to add to the con-fusion, it is also called Bengal gram. The Indians cook it with spices, but the Arabs have created the particular form hummus,which is renowned all through the Middle East and deserves universal acceptance. It is an inspired amalgam of softened chick-peas, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil and, sometimes, the subtle and delectable tahina paste made from sesame seeds.
Then there are the ubiquitous and versatile lentils, the green, brownish, reddish, or mottled seeds of the vetch-like Lens culinaris,one of the world’s oldest leguminous crops. They probably originated in the Near East and Mediterranean, and were certainly known to the Greeks and ancient Egyptians. They still grow where they always grew, although they can be grown as far north as the British Isles. Roman Catholics traditionally ate lentils during Lent and it would be nice to think that the two words have a common origin. But lentil evidently derives from lens meaning lens, and Lent comes from lenten meaning spring. Yet the original meaning of lenten was lengthen; and since lenses, which are lentil-shaped, also make things look longer, there is probably a devious connection after all. But I do not claim to be an authority.
And so to the highly variable group that the English call peas, which are all varieties of the single species Pisum sativum. One hardy group of peas — sometimes called arvense— are eaten dried, and are often sold as split peas. But peas are also eaten fresh, and in several forms: the marrow-fats have large, wrinkled seeds, the round-seeded types are hardier, the petit pois of France are especially tender and small seeded, and the sugar peas, or mange-tout, are grown for their pods. Peas have been largely taken over by the frozen food industry and this is a minor tragedy, for the fresh garden pea is a thing of wonder, and as it ages, through the summer, it gradually slips into mealier guises that are all different and delectable.
Then there is that odd group of pulses that fruit and even flower underground: the groundnut, peanut, or monkey nut. Arachis hypogaea, originally from South America but now grown widely in Asia, Africa and the United States, is the best known. With its 30 per cent protein content and 40 to 50 per cent oil content, it vies nutritionally with the soya. Cooks reasonably treat it as a nut, rather than a pulse; but there can be few more inappropriate ways to serve such a high-calorie, high-fat food than as a pre-dinner cocktail nibble. The peanut can be a versatile and imposing ingredient, as the cuisine of South-East Asia abundantly demonstrates; but the salted peanut, eaten between meals, must be one of the most pernicious foods on the Western scene**.
** [I am much less puritanical than I was 45 years ago and am now very fond of salted peanuts (should anyone ask)]
Several legumes that have been drifting in and out of cultivation in odd pockets of the world for hundreds and probably thousands of years are now recognized as crops of enormous potential. One example is the Bambara groundnut of Africa, Voandzeia subterranea [now apparently included in the genus Vigna].It has a high-protein content like Arachis, but contains much less oil. Its ability to grow in dry conditions is a potential boon, since a good third of the tropics is semi-arid.
The winged bean from tropical Asia, Psophocarpustetragonolobus,has proteinaceous seeds, pods that are said to taste like mushrooms, leaves that are said to taste like spinach, stems like asparagus, and edible tuberous roots; you can also eat the flowers.
Pulses are now enjoying a revival; even supermarkets stock whole herbariums of them. But the new and encouraging vogue is being marred by cynical, or at least muddle-headed, commercial opportunism. I mean, of course, the sale of textured vegetable protein, TVP, which is pulse dressed up as meat; an inferior product sold at an inflated price to people who have no need of it. Since TVPs are now big business, but for no other reason, they deserve a brief discussion.
A Note on TVPs
Textured vegetable protein, which is bean-usually soya-protein spun into fibres like nylon and then bundled to resemble muscle, has been on sale in unobtrusive packets in vegetarian food shops for some decades. But in the 1950s and 1960s, a combination of bumper harvests and agricultural technology transformed pastoral farming into intensive, factory farming; and so long as meat could be produced as if from a conveyor belt, there was no conceivable call for ersatz, except, of course, from vegetarians, who, in the old unsophisticated days, seemed to favour imitations of meat (for example, the ubiquitous nut cutlet, and even, in a final flight of fancy, nutmeat pate carefully sculpted into the shape of turkeys for the Christmas dinner table) even though they rejected meat itself.
By the 1970s, and especially after the disastrous year of 1973, when crops failed in four continents at once, it became clear that meat production could not be expanded indefinitely. But the idea that people needed to eat vast amounts of protein had become well established; indeed, the world’s food shortage was widely considered to be, specifically, a protein gap. Protein in those far off days was equated with meat; and if meat was in short supply, what were people to do?
In addition, meat sales had boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, not least because meat had become relatively cheap — and of course, people do like it. Nutritionists, farmers and government departments, however, managed to conclude not simply that people buy what they like when there is a lot of it about, but that human beings like meat above all other kinds of food. Some nutritionists argued, in romantic vein, that human beings had inherited the blood lust of their hypothetically predatory ancestors and would eat meat, meat and more meat as long as they could afford it. Although this idea is little more than pleasant fantasy, it caught on; it fitted the economic mood of the time, and scientific hypotheses are heavily influenced by economic mood. Thus to the idea that people needed meat was added the idea that they would demand meat if ever it was in short supply; and just in case anyone should feel that they would happily eat Cornish pasties or beans on toast if meat was too dear, nutritionists clamoured to assure them that animal protein was the only proper thing and that to serve their families with lesser foods was irresponsible.
And so by the beginning of the 1970s the time was ripe to take TVPs-ersatz meat-out of the crank food shops and launch them on to the mass market. The minor irritation known as consumer resistance was easily overcome. The aesthetes (including many food writers) who said ersatz was nasty were told they were irresponsible; for the technologists had come up with a world-saver, and the complaints of gourmets were merely effete. The housewives’ objections to this new-fangled stuff were dismissed as old-fashioned prejudice. Textured vegetable proteins, said Georgetown University’s Professor Aaron M. Altschul when Rank Hovis McDougall launched their ersatz Protena in Britain in 1974, were “one of the great food developments of all time”.
The idea was irresistible to the dieticians, who aspire to be scientists and can influence what people eat. Ersatz was introduced into American school meals in 1971 and by 1973 it was being consumed by the thousand tonne. Today, more and more of British schoolchildren’s meals include textured vegetable protein.
Yet the whole idea was never more than nonsense. It simply is not true that people need vast amounts of protein. If you put protein-rich, soya-based TVP into a pie to extend the meat (to use the technologists’ term), then you merely provide the consumer with a surplus of protein; and since humans cannot store protein, they simply burn off the surplus as fuel. Nutritionally, it would be just as effective to extend the meat with potato, to make, for instance, a Cornish pasty; or to extend it with cereal, as in haggis or bacon sandwiches, or with unprocessed pulses, as in the recipes in this chapter. TVPs are also economic nonsense, for although they are cheaper than meat they are nothing like as cheap as potato, bread, or unprocessed pulse; if ever they are, it is only through a freak of marketing.
People survived before the post-war boom in meat consumption; indeed, if they did not die from war or infection, they were healthier than we are today. Cooks extended meat in a thousand delectable ways, according to principles that I endeavour to describe in this book. It is astonishing that anyone could ever have believed that the grisly, ersatz-flavoured TVP was ever necessary; and even more astonishing that people not only believe it, but sanction its use in their children’s food and buy it for their own consumption.
Or rather it would· be astonishing but for two considerations. First, that many people in Britain and the United States have already forgotten the old cooking skills, and prefer the convenience that processed food seems to offer. They also seem to have no knowledge, or only a folk memory, of the traditional ways of eating, for if they had they would see the nonsense of ersatz.
Second, the ersatz boom shows the power of big business, and of the propaganda it can disseminate. Soya beans, the basis of the ersatz industry, have been grown in the United States for decades, not for their protein but for their oil. The protein was almost an embarrassment. It could be sold off for animal feed, but since fishmeal was until recently ridiculously cheap there was not much profit in that. Henry Ford was among the industrialists who realized the potential for texturized soya protein, but he wanted it for car upholstery, not for ersatz meat. The events of the late 1960s and early 1970s-the continuing protein gap myth, the end of the bumper harvests and of the meat boom, the energy crises, and the growth in institutional cooking and food processing generally-provided an almost miraculous opportunity not only to flood the food market with an otherwise embarrassing surplus but also to persuade governments and public alike that this was a responsible thing to do.
So far they have got away with it; but I hope not indefinitely.
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