The Wieringen bean

The Wieringen bean is a small white bean with an ochre spot around the hilum. The spot stays when you cook it. The plant grows only about sixty centimetres, with white flowers and pods of ten to fifteen centimetres. You do not eat the pod. The bean itself is savoury, and not mealy like many other white beans.

On the island they tell that a ship of the Dutch West India Company was too heavy for the channel and unloaded the beans here. That is supposedly how they got their name. That is not certain. What is certain is that it is an old bean of Wieringen, probably brought from Mexico once, and that it nearly disappeared. Tinned beans, with a shorter cooking time, made the ordinary dried bean less popular.

It is sown from the end of May, in the open ground, about fifteen centimetres in the row and forty to fifty centimetres between the rows. It likes warm, dry weather. No climbing support is needed. In August or September you pull up the whole plant and hang it upside down under a roof to dry. The yield is generally high. It is a dried bean, so it keeps for a long time. First soak it for eight hours in cold water, then cook it for about an hour and a half. You do not eat the pod. In the soup, besides the beans, go onion, carrot, bacon and sausage. It also goes in a stew, a salad or a chilli.

Ruurd Walrecht, of Stichting De Oerakker, found the beans again among Dutch immigrants in America. They had taken them from Wieringen and renamed them Wirringer. Back in the Netherlands two growers spread the variety, possibly through the Volkskrant's Boon Plan of 2002. The paper handed out about two hundred beans: it planted five itself, and five went to the first 39 readers who promised to pass on the harvest. In 2007 one grower brought ten kilos to the island museum Jan Lont, to sell them to people from Wieringen. It is still for sale there.