Bean By Bean: A Cookbook: More than 175 Recipes for Fresh Beans, Dried Beans, Cool Beans, Hot Beans, Savory Beans, Even Sweet Beans! [Paperback]

Crescent Dragonwagon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2012 | Age Range: 8 and up

Has there ever been a more generous ingredient than the bean? Down-home, yet haute, soul-satisfyingly hearty, valued, versatile deeply delectable, healthful, and inexpensive to boot, there’s nothing a bean can’t do—and nothing that Crescent Dragonwagon can’t do with beans. From old friends like chickpeas and pintos to rediscovered heirloom beans like rattlesnake beans and teparies, from green beans and fresh shell beans to peanuts, lentils, and peas, Bean by Bean is the definitive cookbook on beans. It’s a 175-plus recipe cornucopia overflowing with information, kitchen wisdom, lore, anecdotes, and a zest for good food and good times.

Consider the lentil, to take one example. Discover it first in a delicious slather, Lentil Tapenade. Then in half a dozen soups, including Sahadi’s Lebanese Lentil Soup with Spinach, Kerala-Style Dahl, and Crescent’s Very, Very Best Lentil, Mushroom & Barley Soup. It then turns up in Marinated Lentils De Puy with Greens, Baked Beets, Oranges & Walnuts. Plus there’s Jamaica Jerk-Style Lentil-Vegetable Patties, Ethiopian Lentil Stew, and Lentil-Celeriac Skillet Sauce. Do the same for black beans—from Tex-Mex Frijoles Dip to Feijoada Vegetariana to Maya’s Magic Black Beans with Eggplant & Royal Rice. Or shell beans—Newly Minted Puree of Fresh Favas, Baked Limas with Rosy Sour Cream, Edamame in a Pod. And on and on—from starters and soups to dozens of entrees. Even desserts: Peanut Butter Cup Brownies and Red Bean Ice Cream.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Crescent Dragonwagon is the James Beard Award–winning author of seven cookbooks, including Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook, Passionate Vegetarian, and, most recently, The Cornbread Gospels. She is also a contributing editor to Relish magazine and has appeared on Good Morning America, Today and NPR’s The Splendid Table. She lives, grows, and cooks her beans on a farm in Putney, Vermont.

Product Details

• Age Range: 8 and up
  
• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company (January 15, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761132414
• ISBN-13: 978-0761132417
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (74 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #36 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Vegetables & Vegetarian > Vegetables
  • #51 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Reference

More About the Author

Crescent Dragonwagon, the author of the James Beard Award-winning Passionate Vegetarian, The Cornbread Gospels, Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook, many children's books, and two novels, has just completed Bean by Bean.

Dragonwagon is a Southern Yankee: though born in New York, for 18 years she was innkeeper/chef/co-owner of Dairy Hollow House, an acclaimed country inn in the Ozark Mountain community of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she resided for 36 years. But, since 2002, she has lived in Westminster West, Vermont.

Dragonwagon has the distinction of having prepared beans and cornbread for a president (Bill Clinton), titled royalty (Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia), a world-renowned feminist (Betty Friedan) and Marilyn Monroe's first biographer (Maurice Zolotow). She teaches two writing workshops, Deep Feast: Writing the World through Food, and Fearless Writing, around the world (the latter, she teaches once a year, in the Whole Enchilada version, from her own home hilltop in the Green Mountains). She has appeared on Good Morning America, Today, TVFN, & CNN.

She lives, writes, and cooks in the 1795 farmhouse which once belonged to her aunt, at which she spent summers when a child. She shares the place with her partner, filmmaker David Koff, and, often, numerous well-fed friends. An ardent gardener, she's currently growing 4 different varieties of bush beans, and 5 of pole beans. .. under the supervision of her large and amiable tabby cat, Cattywhompus (who can usually be found rolling in the catmint).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Trying to add more beans and less meat into your diet? This is a great cookbook choice! January 30, 2012

By Sandra M. Cipriani

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

With the new year, I've decided that I don't want to go totally meatless, however, I do want to add in more vegetarian meals to my week. I have dried beans, however, sometimes I don't know quite what to do with them. This book has given me ideas on how to make healthier and tastier meals with beans. The chili section not only offers different recipes for chili, it also includes recipes for cornbread to eat with your chili. My first recipe out of this book was for Boston Baked Beans (go figure)made out of my crock pot. It had very simple ingredients and came out tasting wonderfully. Much better than what you would get out of any can! This cookbook will be good for all seasons.

78 of 91 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars More than a fabulous bean recipe book! January 23, 2012

By Rachel Lamb

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have been a fan of Crescent Dragonwagon's cookbooks since her "Passionate Vegetarian" became my bible through a decade of personal and culinary transformation into a vegetarian. Bean by Bean is a valuable addition to ANY recipe book collection just because of the well-researched, simple, absolutely delicious recipes. It's not all vegetarian, by the way, Crescent shares some meat adding possibilities and some Vegan options, but mostly she's a vegetarian kind of cook. Bean by Bean is also a culinary education about legumes, lessons that all plant-based diet aspirers (we should all be that, ahem) will appreciate and enjoy. Moreso and to utter delight, it is written in the honest, passionate, life-embracing voice of Crescent Dragonwagon. She knows, she cares, she'll whip you into a frenzy of loving BEANS! You will undoubtedly question how it is you became all "in a lather" over beans, so prepare yourself, lol. Crescent is the ultimate Girlfriend of all of us who love cooking. SO much more Oprah than Martha, Crescent is your friend here as well as your teacher. She's the real deal, she hasn't been invented by a cable TV mogul, she has that Sark kind of approachability and empathy, what you see and what you get is trustworthy, real, experienced, improved, shared. All this because she is not only wonderful, she's a wonderful writer. I am face down in my copy of Bean by Bean, have sent it to 3 young people I know who are taking charge of their diets by embracing Vegetarian and Vegan lifestyles. Here's the magic: In Bean by Bean you learn that you can eat the greatest comforting food on earth AS you save the earth. Bean by Bean is, more than anything else, for those of us who love delicious comfort food, care about healthy eating, and care about the earth and the animals.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Legume Cookbook March 9, 2012

By George Erdosh

Format:Paperback

The 175 recipes in this bean cookbook, Bean by Bean covers the foods of every continent ranging from very simple to sophisticated. The author, Dragonwagon, gives a 22-page introduction about beans and other legumes, everything you need to know from growing to cooking. The book is a medium-format trade paperback, inexpensively produced using green only for color to offset the black-and-white text. Simple, cutsie sketches using green and black break up the text. The writing is good though the frivolous humor is not to everyone's taste. The recipes are very good covering the spectrum from appetizers through hearty casseroles, even some sweets using beans. The many sidebars, some more than a page long, give useful information, facts, quotations, personal stories and even folk songs. Each recipe comes with recipe tags denoting vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and those containing meat. Many give a variation on the recipe. Ingredients are mostly readily available. Though the author promotes using dry beans, many recipes start with canned beans and, unfortunately, she doesn't give conversions. Because of uninterrupted text, recipe layout is not user-friendly forcing the cook to flip pages back and forth during cooking. The well cross-referenced index is excellent. (As appears in Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review.)