a dishgreen beans

Whole or broken pods of the common bean, stewed slow with a piece of pork until they give up their squeak and take on the meat's salt, and served in a cup or a compartment beside the barbecue. They are the plain vegetable on a Carolina barbecue plate — a house that keeps one vegetable and no buffet usually keeps these — and the Southern way with them is long cooking rather than short, so the pod goes soft and olive rather than staying bright.

The pod bean has been in Southern cookbooks as long as there have been Southern cookbooks, under the names the field gave it. Mary Randolph heads the receipt 'Ragout of French Beans, Snaps, String Beans' in 1824 and boils them fifteen minutes before finishing them in brown gravy — the short French method. Maria Massey Barringer, writing at Concord, North Carolina in 1867, gives an hour and a half in salt water and then butter and cream, and adds that the more common way is to boil them with a piece of thin middling, the side of the hog. That second sentence is the Southern one, and the one the barbecue plate inherited. On barbecue menus the bean is the mark of a short kitchen: when Beau Hammond opened Henry's Smokehouse in Greenville, South Carolina, the whole side list was coleslaw and simmered green beans.

The pods are snapped or cut into lengths and the strings pulled off, where there are any. They go into a pot with a piece of streak-of-lean, fatback, ham hock or bacon and enough water to cover, and simmer an hour or more until soft; new potatoes are often dropped in with them for the last stretch. Salt, black pepper, sometimes a little sugar or a splash of the pot's own vinegar. The pot liquor goes into the bowl with them. A shorter method — fifteen or twenty minutes, then butter and cream — is in the old books and is not what a pit serves.

On the plate at B's Barbecue in Greenville, North Carolina, where the sides are slaw, potatoes or green beans; the whole side list at Henry's Smokehouse in Greenville, South Carolina, with the coleslaw; on the buffets at McCabe's in Manning and Shealy's in Batesburg-Leesville; printed as string beans on the menu at Parker's in Wilson.