Southwest Home Cooking
Introduction

Beans

Many experts consider the bean the most important food in the West. They tell us that the bean ended the nomadic life of the Southwest Native American. Villages were built to allow the Native peoples to grow the bean. In the Western expansion, the bean was important to their diets. The chuckwagon cook used the bean to feed the hungry cowboys. The wagon trains West staple was the bean. The railroad construction crews diet was the important bean.

It was common for the Indian farmers to plant corn and squash, and then add beans in the same row. As the corn reached a few inches high, the beans would use the corn stalk as a bean pole. The corn plant then shaded the squash. The squash leaves, an ideal ground cover, conserved any moisture that happened along.

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