Petra Sloane keeps her dried beans in glass quart jars on a shelf above the kettle in her flat in the Stockbridge neighborhood of Edinburgh. There are seven jars. Each has a small index card taped to the lid with the variety name, the source, and the month she bought it. She rotates the stock by season.
The seven beans, as of late April 2026, are Marcella Hazan-style Italian borlotti, Spanish judion butter beans, Rancho Gordo Royal Corona, Rancho Gordo Vaquero, French green flageolet from a small importer in London, organic UK-grown carlin peas, and a working jar of supermarket dried cannellini for nights when she has not planned.
The exercise that produced this shelf took Petra fourteen months. From January 2025 through February 2026 she cooked fourteen varieties of dried bean, one a week, in a heavy enameled pot on her stove. She made each one twice, once plainly with salt and olive oil and once in a more complex preparation. She kept a notebook. The notebook is the basis of this piece.
The first thing to say about dried beans is that the conventional wisdom is correct. Beans cooked from dried are better than beans from a tin, for almost every use except a quick weeknight chickpea salad. The texture is creamier. The flavor is rounder. The cooking liquid, which a tin throws away, becomes a stock that is the foundation of half a dozen dishes.
The second thing to say is that age matters more than variety. A bean dried two years ago will not cook well no matter how aristocratic its lineage. Petra learned this with a bag of fancy heirloom beans from a small American producer, which had been sitting in a friend's pantry since 2022 and which she received as a gift. After four hours of simmering they were still chalky. She composted them.
The third thing is that the soak is largely a matter of timing, not necessity. Petra does not soak. She cooks her beans from dry in plenty of water, low and slow, and they come out fine. The soak shortens cooking time by perhaps forty minutes. For a pot that is going to be on the stove for two and a half hours regardless, the soak is a convenience, not a virtue.
Now to the beans.
Borlotti, the speckled cranberry-and-cream bean of northern Italy, was the bean Petra had highest hopes for and which delivered. Cooked in water with a wedge of onion, a clove of garlic, a sprig of rosemary, and a glug of olive oil for about ninety minutes, they were creamy and substantial. The pink markings fade to a uniform brown in the pot. The cooking liquid is the stock for a pasta e fagioli that fed her and her partner Hamish twice. She buys borlotti from a small Italian importer in Leith.
Judion butter beans from Spain are enormous. The size of a quail's egg, almost. Cooked for two hours with a ham hock and a bay leaf, they are the best beans Petra has ever eaten. The skin is thin and the interior is custard. She has served them with grilled bread and the cooking liquid as a soup, and as a salad with chopped parsley, lemon, and good olive oil. She buys judion from a Spanish food shop on Leith Walk.
Royal Corona, the Rancho Gordo bean that has become a small cult object among English-speaking cooks, is a very good bean. Similar in size to judion, slightly more compact in texture. Worth the price if you can get them, which in the UK is not always easy. Petra paid eleven pounds for a pound of them through a London importer in 2025 and considered the money well spent.
Vaquero, also from Rancho Gordo, is a small black-and-white bean with a flavor that Petra found more interesting than its appearance suggested. Earthy, slightly smoky on its own. Excellent in a chili. Cooks faster than the larger beans, about seventy minutes from dry. She uses them in a vegetarian version of a Texas-style chili that she makes for friends who do not eat meat.
Flageolet, the small pale green bean of French cuisine, was a surprise. Petra had cooked them once before, years earlier, and had been unmoved. This time, cooked with a single clove of garlic and a sprig of thyme and finished with a knob of butter, they were extraordinary. Tender, faintly grassy, a little sweet. The traditional accompaniment is a leg of lamb, which Petra does not often cook, but the beans on their own with bread are dinner.
Carlin peas, the dark brown legume traditional to the northeast of England and southern Scotland, are an acquired taste that Petra acquired. Earthy, almost gamy, with a satisfying chew. She cooks them simply with bacon and onion and serves them with malt vinegar, which sounds strange and is correct. She buys them from a small organic producer in Cumbria.
The supermarket cannellini are fine. They are not great. They are reliable. They cook in about an hour. They make a serviceable white bean soup with garlic and rosemary. They are the bean she reaches for on a Wednesday in February when she has not planned ahead. There is no shame in this. A pantry is not a museum.
Of the seven beans that did not make the final shelf, the most regretful absence is the corona bean she cooked in March 2025 from a tiny producer in Greece. The beans were superb. They are also unobtainable in Scotland. She tasted them, took notes, and let them go.
The biggest disappointment of the fourteen months was a much-praised purple-and-yellow bean from a heritage seed catalogue in California. The beans were beautiful raw. Cooked, they turned a uniform grey-brown and tasted like nothing in particular. Petra has not bought them since.
A few practical notes. Salt the cooking water at the start. The old advice that salt toughens the skin is wrong. Petra has tested this with paired pots and found no difference. Cook on the stovetop, not in a slow cooker, where the bean cannot tell you when it is done. Use a heavy pot with a tight lid. Cover the beans by three inches of water and add more as needed. Skim the foam in the first ten minutes. Taste at the bottom of the time range and every fifteen minutes after.
Reserve the cooking liquid. It is one of the most useful things produced in any kitchen. Frozen in ice cube trays it keeps for months. It will lift a soup. It will make a vegetarian risotto taste like it had stock.
The seven jars on the shelf above the kettle will change with the seasons. Petra cooks more beans in winter and fewer in summer, when the broad beans and runner beans of the garden take over. By August the cannellini jar will be nearly empty and the borlotti will go untouched.
But the jars are always there. The cards on their lids tell her when each was bought. She tries to use them within twelve months. The pantry is a small, slow archive, and the beans are its quietest residents.
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