Where the Green Beans Grow

GREEN BEANS ARE THE ULTIMATE CULINARY EQUALIZER. ACCESSIBLE IN both fare and form. Almost every cultural community has enjoyed a love affair with them, from Korean green bean banchan to Mexican ejotes guisados (stewed green beans) to Southern-style green beans made by African American com-unities across the region. This is true for Armenian cuisine as well. We call our green bean dish gananch fassoulia, which comes from the scientific name for beans: Phaseolus.

Born in Iran to parents of Armenian descent, I grew up in a house where green beans were treasured. The dish has several variations, but the one cooked by my mother and grandmothers was accompanied by hunks of beef, fingerling potatoes, onions, and sour plums. They'd cook it slowly over the stove for what felt like hours until the beans were tender enough to cut with a fork. Served with cold yogurt, green beans were the ultimate comfort food, a simple peasant dish that hit the spot, as they tend to do. That's why it was one of the first things I started to cook when I moved from my American hometown in Los Angeles to Detroit.

With my family thousands of miles away, I was in my own space for the first time, nostalgic for my childhood. But away from the confines of my mom's kitchen, my green bean experience expanded in ways I was not expecting. I live on the Detroit/Hamtramck border in an area called Banglatown. For more than loo years, this part of town has served as a starting point for immigrants from all around the world, a place where people came in waves to rebuild their lives, whether they were from Poland, Ukraine, Bosnia, Syria, Ethiopia, or Mexico. More than 3o languages are spoken here, making Hamtramck Michigan's most internationally diverse city. My neighbors are mostly from Bangladesh and Yemen. And it turns out that we all share an obsession with beans. Every summer, my neighborhood transforms into a modem Midwest version of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Roofs are covered with squash plants, backyards are bursting with chili peppers, and trellises hold up many varieties of green beans, covering entire plots of land where houses once stood.

Read the rest at Hour Detroit, July 2020, Illustration by Marina Anselmi