Fat Marrows and Runner Beans

personal essay + recipe

When I was a kid I never ate my vegetables. Nan would serve our Sunday dinner, and there on my plate would be a slab of rich roast beef with the fat trimmed off, a fluffy Yorkshire pudding, and a mound of mashed potatoes that I could make into a volcano, with oodles of rich brown gravy as the lava. Mashed potatoes did not count as vegetables, and neither did chips, though roast potatoes did. And occasionally a small heap of orange carrots would be mashed up on the side. My sister ate carrots, but I never touched mine, as my mom kept reminding us.

‘Leave him. He’ll eat them in time,’ said Nan.

After dinner we lay down before a spitting coal fire. My sister and I teased Prince, bloated on the hearth rug after eating our leftovers with specially reserved gravy (‘Don’t forget the dog!’). We watched the Sunday matinee on BBC1, which usually involved Tarzan or a volcano, and Mom and Nan would fall asleep with the News of the World in their laps and their jaws wide open. When the snoring grew too loud and drowned out Tarzan’s roars, we joined Grandad down the garden.

My grandparents had a large vegetable garden. They grew old potatoes, new potatoes, cabbages, carrots, onions, spring onions, Spanish onions, Brussels sprouts, purple sprouting broccoli, leeks, peas. They had a gooseberry bush, a rhubarb patch, and three apple trees, and we were allowed to pick the raspberries that grew over the fence from Totty’s next door. There were great heads of beetroots, and a row of radishes, and another of lettuces, and mint and sage trimmed the edge of the rosebeds. Sage and onion stuffing came out of a cardboard box but Nan always ‘livened it up’ with fresh sage, just as mint always boiled with the potatoes.

My sister and I once tried to nurse marrows in a cucumber frame so we could show off with one at the Harvest Festival, as none of the other kids had grandparents who lived in the countryside with vegetable gardens. We planted seeds, and watered and waited, and vines appeared, then flowers, but our marrows were stunted, and this was an era that predated courgettes.

So Grandad begged a great big voluptuous marrow off John Mills down the lane, who apparently had green fingers, though they looked as white as ours. And ‘our’ fat marrow had pride of place at the Harvest Festival, among the other kids’ offerings of cans of Heinz baked beans or two-pound bags of sugar. Common muck, said Nan, paltry fare you could get off the shelf at the Co-op, mothers today were lazy trollops, in her day …

Nan insisted on cooking a smaller marrow herself. It tasted watery, based on the single mouthful of boiled mush I spat out. Nan served the rest in pigs’ trotter stew. Nan and Grandad took out their false teeth and sucked on the bones of the pigs’ feet, pulling away with a jerk of their heads, licking their gums and smacking their salty lips.

And some poor soul won the giant marrow at the Harvest Festival after guessing its weight correctly.

My grandad’s pride and joy were his runner beans. They grew on bamboo canes he pulled from the shed every spring to erect in a crisscrossed row tied together with string. And the deep green leaves and lighter green vines climbed the canes, twisting and turning into sinewy lovehearts, and where was Jack for his beanstalk?

And midsummer brought startling orange blooms, oranger than oranges, and the leaves grew higher, and denser, lush and green, fat and lazy, shiny in the sun, and the beans began to grow, short stubs that very soon were long, dangling pods.

The canes sometimes got blown down in blustery storms, and we’d help Grandad to rescue them, getting gritty mud under our fingernails, and then we’d come in from the cold and sting our hands pink as we washed them clean in hot water.

And on Sunday mornings we’d run down the garden, and pick beans: beans waiting for the plucking, beans hiding behind the leaves, beans that looked like dinosaur skin, lizardy rough and scaly and ancient. And then we’d come back inside and on a sheet of newspaper (‘That’s this week’s News of the World!’) peel the vinous threads from round the beans so they could be sliced into slanty little chunks and boiled for dinner.

I’d progressed to special requests for gravy made with cabbage water, sweet and aromatic, even though it made us fart all the way through Tarzan, and now I also ate runner beans. Just a few on the side of the plate, and if they were dowsed in gravy they tasted like gravy, with a certain metallic undertaste that wasn’t unpleasant.

And beans led to peas, which were actually quite sweet and I preferred raw, but if I moved them to the side of my plate I could eat them like fruit at the end of my dinner.

And then because I’d eaten all my vegetables, I could have some custard creams to tide me over till tea, when I’d have boiled ham sandwiches with sweet Lurpak butter, and Madeira cake, and jelly, chunks of pineapple suspended in green, mandarin slices wobbling in red.

But beans were the breakthrough.

*

Years later, I went away to university. I came home that first Christmas a changed man: a vegetarian.

‘You’ll have a bit of turkey, won’t you?’

‘No. You know I don’t eat meat anymore.’

‘A bit won’t hurt.’

‘Nan!’

‘Go on, nobody’ll know. I’ll leave a bit on the side of your plate.’

I fed it to the dog.

My grandparents’ vegetable garden was a bounty for my reformed non-carnivorous self. Grandad, now retired and keen to get out from under Nan’s feet, lavished the garden with time and the richest of manures, and it was a jungle of goodness, green and rich in its bounty. Uncle John had bought my grandparents a freezer, and what they did not eat fresh they froze, or jarred the old-fashioned way, and they gave plenty away, exchanging what they had for what they had not, such as tomatoes from Bill’s greenhouse.

And I ate all their garden had to offer – the beans and the peas and the beetroots and sprouts, cabbage and carrots and hard new potatoes. And always the beans. They tasted green, and they tasted of metal, that tang of blood when you bite your lip, a taste of life and goodness. I ate bowl after bowl of beans, topped and tailed and sliced, then boiled or steamed or lightly fried in butter and shallots, with a tomato chucked in and lots of black pepper.

Thankfully we’d all given up on the marrows.

I went back to university, and a week later I received a bulky brown office envelope in the post. Nan’s doodly handwriting was on the outside, and on the inside was a bundle of News of the Worlds wrapped scrappily round a dozen runner beans. ‘Something for your dinner’ said that unmistakeable twirly-curly handwriting.

There is a sixth sense – a sense beyond sight, sound, taste, touch and smell – and that sense is memory. The recollection on the back of your tongue of runner beans fresh from your grandparents’ garden, even though they’ve been dead for thirty years and you can’t remember the last time you didn’t eat them from Waitrose.

*

Which did of course, thirty years after the twirly handwriting, send me to Waitrose. Here’s what I made for dinner last night:

Runner Bean & Courgette Salad

300g runner beans, topped and tailed and cut into squares, boiled for five minutes then run under a cold tap
2 courgettes, sliced into thin discs and gently fried in olive oil for about ten minutes until they start to brown
1 clove garlic, chopped and added to the courgettes at the end of their frying
1 large carrot, grated
half a bulb of fennel, sliced thinly
1 spring onion, sliced thinly
4 large radishes, sliced thinly

I tossed the vegetables together, and poured over the dressing: to two tablespoons of tahini I added the juice of a lemon, a tablespoon of red wine vinegar, a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, and a tablespoon of water, then mixed it all into a smooth blend. You might have to experiment a bit to get the balance and flavour right (water is often your friend here).

I served with a spoonful of burrata and pomegranate seeds. Salt and pepper to taste.

Today, I might serve the rest with broken walnuts (texture) and some black olives (depth) and maybe some tomatoes (fresh and sweet). Other veggies would work well too, e.g., celery or chicory or red cabbage, and there might be ways to zhoozh up the dressing, e.g., with cinnamon or Persian lime.

And for afters: does Waitrose sell Madeira cake?!

*

An earlier version was first published in Uncontained, edited by Jennifer Heath (2007).