Borlotti beans, rain, a spider and a Muppet

Abundance: 2 November 2023

The spider that’s made its home between the handle and the corner of the velux window in my office has no idea how lucky he is. What must be a month of forgetting to sweep the hoover’s nozzle upwards has given him a web that - judging by his size - has done for many of the last of summer’s flies. 

In its cosy, happy existence, he has no idea that just a couple of centimetres away a fortnight of almost constant, big-drop cartoon rain has thrown itself towards him; a sandwich of glass separating him from a theme park ride down three floors of drainpipe and gutter to the garden drain. By now, I’d have expected to unblock that drain, but only the leaves that fall as the days shorten rather than when the cold hits have left the trees. 

It’s a peculiar autumn. 

The cold comes only with the wind; the soil is as warm as the sea and what I usually might rush to pick ahead of mid-October cold is as happy as early September. The yacon has even thrown out a couple of new flowers this week, when I’d usually expect its beautifully soft leaves to be blackened by the cold.

And while this lack of chill means the lemon verbena and scented geraniums are safe for now, the mooli patch can grow on for a bit, the apios doesn’t need lifting in a hurry, the woodland artichokes are - I hope - flourishing underground, I can feel all of that harvesting and processing ruckelling up like waiting room carpet, to be concertinaed into a few days who-knows-when as the cold finally hits.

For now, it rains. 

And in the absence of any sign that it will end, the borlottis need my attention.  

Picking borlottis in September, another year

Along with salsify, borlottis were the first thing my wife and I planted that we’d never tasted before. The sunny autumn that followed showed me how much lay beyond the shops, how many incredible flavours there were to enjoy if you find a little time to grow them.  While borlottis are now commonly found tinned - and pretty good they are too - a year without those glorious pods in the garden doesn’t feel quite complete.  

Borlotti pods’ shape is as unremarkably familiar as many beans, but their glorious splatter of crimson and cream is enough to render them spectacular. 

The beans are loyal to the pods’ colour scheme, although their crimson splashes seem in inverse proportion to the pod they’re in, as if there’s only so much paint to go round. You might think it doesn’t really matter as the beans lose their mottle when cooked, but that bit of Jack and the Beanstalk magic still thrills whatever’s left of 6 year old me.

I used to pick most of the borlottis in the heart of summer, while they were still soft, to make into hummus or ribolitta, but I tend to leave them until September now, when the bean teepees look shabby as Sweetums from the Muppets. At that point, the beans themselves are demi-sec - half dry - which means they’re perfectly timed for the end of tomato-harvest soups. 

For a collection of reasons, they remained unpicked into October. At some point, as their leaves fell and a few of the vines turned brown, it made better sense to let them dry out completely before harvesting. Ideally, the pods dry to witch’s fingers on the plant; this year the rain has other ideas. They maybe mottled Caramac and leather, but dry they aren’t.

Picking borlottis in very late October

In one of those sunny intermissions that makes you wonder if it really was torrential an hour ago, we strip the plants bare, leaving the roots in the soil to enrich the ground with the nitrogen they’ve captured from the air as they grew. Brown and crisp as the pods mostly are, they’re laid out on a table for the radiator to do its occasional work when the house drops enough for the thermostat to talk to it.

Every day or so, I’ll split one lengthways to release the beans to see if they’re ready. One of the things I love about leaving the beans this late is that the inside of the pod shines like an oyster shell.  So many small pleasures.

Once a bean is so hard a cat couldn’t scratch it, it is fully dry and can be stored in a jar to use anytime. 

Borlotti’s spiritual homeland is the Veneto region of Italy - Verona, Venice and Valpolicella - and its classic radicchio and borlotti soup and a cold weather version of Tuscany’s ribolitta are exactly what I want these borlottis for. Maybe I’ll try some in Boston baked beans.

And there it is again, the ping ping ping of fat drops on glass. The spider twitches in his web. Time to bring the washing in. Maybe next week, I’ll put some borlottis on to soak.