I grew up thinking soy beans were an ordinary garden vegetable. Every year, my mother planted soy from seeds purchased at the tiny general store in Mastersonville. It wasn’t until I was 21 and finally living in a “real” house on my own (not in the university dormitories) that I realised the rest of America didn’t even know what soy beans were. My attempts to find fresh soy beans in 1990 in Ann Arbor, Michigan failed. In fact, the only soy product I could find were “soy nuts”—roasted, salted soy beans—at a health food store. They were stale and mealy, and so hard they nearly broke my teeth.
It seemed that no one outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania ate fresh soy beans as a vegetable. Everyone thought I was nuts. I started asking my mother to send me a packet of seeds every spring, from the store in Mastersonville.
Many years later, I learned about Japanese edamame and recognised it as the fresh soy beans of my youth. Fresh soy beans have been eaten since at least the 1200s in China, Japan and other Asian countries, and are apparently popular bar food in Japan, served steamed and salted in the pod to be snacked on alongside your beer.
Soy beans arrived in the American Colonies in 1765, but were mostly used as a forage crop. When and why the people in south eastern Pennsylvania began to eat fresh soy is unclear. And why no one else in America did is even more unclear, since soy’s sweet, nutty flavour beats the socks off of other beans Americans commonly eat fresh (I’m thinking about those mealy lima beans…).
Soy beans as garden vegetable only arrived in New Zealand in the past 6 years or so. I was unable to get seeds when we first arrived, and when I first contacted an Asian seed supplier to enquire about them, I was told they were still building up their stock, and couldn’t sell them yet.
Even now, though I can get soy bean seeds, I have been unable to locate the appropriate bacterial inoculant for them, and they grow poorly here. Still, I grow them–my garden feels incomplete without them. However it came to be, I feel a cultural connection to soy beans—that Asian/Pennsylvania Dutch fusion food. Go figure.
Robinne Weiss 