I have already described to you some of the dishes we made, and still make, with beans. Following are some messes I have not described:
Ama´ca Di´hĕ, or Beans-Boiled. The beans were boiled in a clay pot, with a piece of buffalo fat, or some bone grease. If the beans were dried beans, they were boiled a little longer than squash is boiled—a half hour or more. Spring salt, or other seasoning, was not used.
Green beans, shelled from the pod, were sometimes prepared thus, boiled with buffalo fat or bone grease; but green beans did not have to be boiled quite as long as dried beans.
Green Beans Boiled in the Pod. Green beans in the pod we boiled and ate as a vegetable from the time they came in until fall; but we did not plant beans, as we did corn, to make them come in late in the season, that we might then eat them green.
Green beans in the pod were boiled in a clay pot, with a little fat thrown in. Pods and seeds were eaten together.
But a green bean pod has in it two little strings that are not very good to eat. At meal time the boiled pod was taken up in the fingers and carried to the eater’s mouth. At one end of the pod is always a kind of little hook; the unbroken pod was taken into the mouth with this little hook forward, between the teeth; and the eater, seizing the little hook between thumb and finger, drew it out of his mouth with the two little strings that were always attached to the hook.
Green Corn and Beans. Pounded green shelled corn was often boiled with green beans, shelled from the pod.