Despite their association with the romantic and rocky Mediterranean and the diet of peasants since time immemorial, most beans we eat – the white beans of a thousand Tuscan soups and the fine green beans of intensive Kenyan farming only came to Europe and the Old World as part of the so-called Columbian exchange; before that beans meant broad beans, fava beans fresh or dried.
The mathematician Pythagoras, besides practicing what we would call vegetarianism, notoriously avoided and insisted his followers avoid broad beans, supposedly because he believed them to be the containers of human souls transmigrating from one life to the next.
With their hidden softness the pods of fresh broad beans would certainly make a good container for souls or other precious cargo in long transit; everyone podding broad beans has at one time or another, especially if podding them in the afternoon of a long hot day in the kitchen, thought how nice it would be to nap in the cool embrace of a broad bean pod, relaxed and green.
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