There are times when I go to pick up my CSA and find myself at a crossroads.

Butter beans, I never knew you.

Some weeks, I go to the Five Points Farm Market and find familiar, much-loved foods:  tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and berries. And some weeks, I go and find foods that have always fallen under the heading of Foods I Don’t Like. This week was one of those weeks. The food in question:  butter beans.

I grew up going to my grandmother’s house in Warner Robins, Georgia, for a big lunch once every month or so. These were intense culinary affairs. The house smelled of food that had been slow cooking for hours. The smell hung thick around me as I walked into the house, and I knew the spread I would find in the kitchen:  fried chicken, field peas, biscuits, chocolate pie, and butter beans. The fried chicken and the biscuits and chocolate pie I ate happily. The butter beans I tried once and never touched again.

Many people, especially those who are from the South, are familiar with butter beans that have been slow cooked, simmering in a pot with side meat or salted pork, perhaps a bay leaf and some salt, for several hours. In my mind, that was the only way to cook butter beans, and even though it’s a sin against some code of Southern decorum, I just couldn’t get down with those slow cooked beans. Something about the texture – though truth be told, I’ve never really been a bean person. A friend once lovingly picked the beans out of a bowl of chili before serving it to me because kidney beans are by far my least favorite of the whole bean family. My parents stopped trying to serve me beans years ago. They threw up their hands in defeat as I picked around beans in soup and chili, as I deftly passed the bowl of beans down the table to my sister without taking any for myself.

I’m not sure why I’ve been a bean hater. But I have been. In my adult years, I’ve found ways to compromise. I make a mean white bean soup that I like a lot. But by and large, I have maintained my distaste of beans and found ways to live a happy, functional, bean-free life.

Which brings me back to this week’s conundrum of butter beans. Because I could easily have made something out of the doughnut peaches we got and called it a day. But that seems to go against the spirit of my CSAcation, which focuses more and more on reclaiming foods that were previously considered lost. My CSAcation is about pushing myself out of the comfort of “I don’t like that” and into the exciting new horizons of “I might actually like that on my own terms.” And so I appealed to friends on Facebook for guidance on what to do with those blasted beans.

Chris Hill of Bachelor Kitchen suggested I make succotash hummus (from his column last week). Rachel, of Buy Fresh, Buy Local Hampton Roads, suggested slow cooking with ham, using the rationale that nothing can be bad that spends that much time in a pot with ham. Another friend suggested I use them in salads, and another offered up bacon as a way to make any vegetable more palatable.

And so, on Sunday, armed with the courage of my convictions, I picked a recipe online. I knew the slow cooking method wasn’t for me, and I wanted to try something new, something that would give me a new way to (hopefully) enjoy the beans.

Dana's hometown is the home of Gone with the Wind. It explains a lot. | eleanor-brown.com

I should pause here to say that I had one extra ulterior motive in cooking butter beans. The past few weeks in particular, I have felt an old familiar flight instinct, that soul cry of “I want to go home.” I’ve blogged (okay, whined) about the need for comfort, that restless late summer slump that I’ve treated with wine and cookies. I’ve longed for Georgia, for sticky humidity and slow afternoons, for evenings filled with the ticking of cicadas. I’ve wished for the ability to head home, however briefly, because when the shit hits the fan and life gets to be too much (as it has recently), I default to Georgia. My spirit searches for a place it can rely on, that it can predict and find comfort in, and that place is Georgia. I can trust in red clay, and family, in cold beer and greasy food that I don’t have to cook. (Cue the theme music from Gone with the Wind.) And cooking those butter beans yesterday was the closest I could come to Georgia this weekend. There is something inherently homey to cooking butter beans. I didn’t expect it because I didn’t harbor strong feelings of affection for the beans, but as I set them in a pot of boiling water and began frying up bacon, I felt a strong tie to home; I needed that. It was, for me, a new way to define comfort food; by cooking something that is so heavily tied to home, I could achieve a piece of that in my kitchen in Virginia.

Butter beans with sweet corn and bacon

The recipe I chose for the beans called for a much shorter cooking time and made for a delicious, tangy, slightly peppery, salty mixture of beans, corn, bacon, onion, and garlic. These definitely weren’t my grandmother’s beans. They weren’t mushy or overly porky. The bacon retains much of its crispiness, making this dish heartier than I would have expected. As my roommate, Heather, watched, I tried a couple bites and found I didn’t hate the butter beans. In fact, the more I ate, the more I enjoyed them. She tried some, too, and since she has been a longtime lover of butter beans, I used her as my official test of goodness. She declared that they were good and spooned more into her bowl. Operation Reclaim Butter Beans:  success.

Butter Beans with Bacon and Sweet Corn

(Modified from recipe on Real Simple)

Serves 8 people

8 slices bacon

Extra virgin olive oil

1 medium onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon sea salt

1 pound butter beans

Corn from 2-3 ears sweet corn (cut off the cob)

1 tablespoon honey

3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1 teaspoon pepper

In a large skillet, fry bacon slices. Transfer to plate. Add enough oil to the bacon drippings to measure ¼ cup. Add onion, garlic, and salt. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook butter beans. For fresh beans, boil in eight cups of water and half a tablespoon of salt for 30 minutes. Drain and transfer to a bowl and keep warm.

Add corn to onion mixture and cook 2-3 minutes. Add honey and vinegar. Cook one more minute, and then pour over beans. Add pepper and sprinkle with crumbled bacon.

For more posts and stories like these, visit us on Facebook at AltDaily Food and “Like” our page.