The Bean Book

by Rose Elliot

The Bean Book gives the low-down on beans of every flavor, color and variety.

Genres: Food, Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Reference, Vegetarian, Cooking

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Rose Elliot is a British vegetarian cookery writer. She has written 55 books on vegetarian cookery, which have sold three million copies all around the world. Her first book, Simply Delicious, was published in 1967. Her latest cookery book, The Best Of Rose Elliot: The Ultimate Vegetarian Collection was published by Mitchell Beazley in 2014. She is patron of the Vegetarian Society, VIVA (Vegetarian International Voice for Animals) and The Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation. She also supports Compassion In World Farming, and OXFAM for whom she has written three best-selling books to raise funds. In 1999 she was awarded the MBE for services to vegetarian cookery. She lives in Hampshire and in London, and is a member of MENSA.

Reviews

[David Mundy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clearly written, unpretentious, and with quite easy recipes without the obscure and hard to find ingredients many cookery books have. In my early days of vegetarian cooking I soaked beans overnight; now, like most users I think, I take advantage of the huge variety now available tinned. Whichever way, beans and pulses are perennial vegetarian staples, and Rose Elliot was a helpful pioneer of vegetarian food when it was still quite a fringe interest, and this book is still useful.

[Minaminu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers a great variety of bean and lentils recipes, it's great for vegetarians, my meat eaters friends love the food !!! The recipes are easy to follow and also very cheap (especially if you buy the dry beans).

[zoe k · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not done my English essay, but boy do I know a lot about beans now!

[Lee Broderick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've always loved pulses. As a child I found their bright, shiny colours and curving, minimalist shapes an exciting thing to find on my plate. Their texture was interesting - soft but firm and their flavours delicate. In the summer, when sunlight and rain pushed our garden into over-abundance, we'd all gather around the big farmhouse kitchen table and shed pods of peas and broad beans for hours (oh yes, broad beans - the one pulse I didn't like as a child, I found it far too bitter). That was tedious but now it's another source of fond memories. As an adult, I barely go a day without cooking with them in some way - salads in summer and soups in winter - and I now appreciate them nutritionally as well as for the qualities mentioned above. High in protein and starch, my girlfriend will never agree with me counting them as a vegetable - but they are: rich in various vitamins, minerals and fibre.

So, when I stumbled upon this book in a charity shop, it raised a smile and I bought it.

The inside covers of the book are used, ingeniously, to provide colour photographs of the twenty one pulses mentioned in the text of the book, together with a scale. These are then described in the first sixth of the book which also provides a short history of pulses and general notes on things such as storing, growing, nutrition and preparation. By and large, this is pretty good but, nearly thirty five years after publication, some of the details have, of course, changed with regards to nutrition and, particularly, the archaeological story.

As far as the recipes are concerned, there are two indications as to the book's age. A preponderance of kidney beans and, especially, butter beans, reminds me of my childhood when these were the beans we could get which we couldn't grow. More telling still, a variety of rationing era recipes (under-spiced, for obvious reasons) are provided which provide an interesting side-note to British culinary history alongside abominations of 'foreign dishes'. I was amused that two recipes were given for 'curry sauce' ('English' and 'Indian') and that, even in the seventies, the 'English' variation was hotter. An Indian reader would be appalled by the use of curry powder in either though, this is very much a sign of its time. The idea of serving spaghetti with lentils is also an abomination and I shan't be held responsible for my actions if anyone ever tries serving it to me.

Overall then, I have slightly mixed feelings about this book. It's an interesting piece of culinary history - a snapshot British vegetarianism as the country began to emerge from rationing - but I can't see myself ever cooking from it. I'd like to rate it highly but as a book for the modern kitchen I'm afraid I just can't recommend it.