Bean, Bush Dry, 'Zolfino'

*Ark of Taste Heirloom*
During the 1999 World Trade Organization Meeting’s “Battle in Seattle”, while protests and chaos reigned in the streets, inside the proceedings Italian Agricultural minister Paolo de Castro stood up and waved a bag of beans in the faces of the assembled neoliberal bureaucrats. The meaning? To express a need to protect genetic heritage and regionalized biodiversity against the onslaught of global free trade and cultural hegemony. The Beans? “Fagioli Zolfini” from the Valdarno, a hilly region of eastern Tuscany. At one point nearly extinct, its production was resurrected by an “Associazione del fagiolo Zolfino del Pratomagno” and the bean was boarded on Slow Food Italy’s Ark of Taste in 2000. The small, thin-skinned, light yellow beans (zolfo means “sulpher” in Italian) cook up with a wonderful creamy texture and really only need a bit of sage, rosemary, salt, pepper, and good olive oil. In the Pratomango there is a tradition, Fagioli al fiasco, where the beans are placed in an old fashioned Chianti-type wine flask (fiasco) and cooked overnight in a wood-fired stone oven with the remaining embers and heat from the day’s bread baking. *sigh* Our culinary lives should be so romantic… Bush type with very slight running habit.
95 days. UO

Packet: 1oz (85 seeds)