The Names

On Sunday, November 4, 1492, three weeks after his first landing in the New World, Christopher Columbus saw lands planted with “faxones and fabas very diverse and different from ours [those of Spain]and two days afterward, following the north coast of Cuba,” he again found “land well cultivated with these fexoes and habas much unlike ours” (Hedrick 1931: 3).

In a transcription (Dunn and Kelley 1989: 132) from Columbus’s diary, the Spanish phrase faxones y favas has been translated as “beans and kidney beans” (Morrison and Jane-Vigneras, cited by Dunn and Kelley 1989: 133). But considering what Columbus might have seen in the markets or kitchens of the fifteenth-century Iberian–Mediterranean world, faxone probably refers to the African–Asian cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), and fava surely means the fava (= faba), or broad bean (Vicia faba), long known in Europe and the Mediterranean–Asian world. Columbus’s brief record presaged the long confusion and debate over the names and origins of some important food grain legumes. Had herbalists and botanical authors of the succeeding three centuries taken account of Columbus’s recognition that these New World legumes were different from those of Europe, some of the confusion might have been avoided.

The beans, peas, and lentils (pulses, or food grain legumes) discussed in this chapter are legumes, treated in technical botanical literature as members of the very large family Fabaceae (= Leguminosae), subfamily Papilionoideae (having butterflylike flowers), although some taxonomists accord this group family status (Papilionaceae). The names of the species, however, are not changed by the differing positions taken by plant taxonomists on family nomenclature. The flowers of papilionaceous legumes have five petals consisting of one broad standard, two lateral wings, and two keel petals that clasp the 10 stamens and single ovary (which becomes the pod).