ISSUE 6, BEANS, Part 5: Soy

America Discovers the Mystical Bean 1870-1900

“The Bean” Arrives

In the period after the Civil War, there was a period of agricultural fascination with Japanese plants: the Kaki Persimmons and Japanese Plums appeared in California and Florida, Japanese clover was tried as a cover and forage crop, and the soy bean with its remarkable protein profile first appeared under the name “Japanese Pea” or “Japanese Bean.” In 1880 it began being sold as the “Soja Bean.” 

The soy bean differed in culinary character and chemistry than both the Native beans and the African diaspora cowpeas/field peas grown extensively in the region.  By 1870 reports about the beneficial qualities of the Japanese legumes were prompting experimental farmers to secure seed from the USDA.  The first reports of its field performance came out of Germany where crops were undertaken in the late 1860s.  Non-Chinese Californians began cultivating them in Berkeley in 1878; Chinese Californians probably cultivated them prior to the Civil War. Southern experimental planters grew crops in the 1870 season. By 1874 there were national brokers advertising seed for sale in southern newspapers—see ad below from a Pulaski TN newspaper. 

The 1870s saw global interest in the bean developed, largely because of its chemistry—“the seeds are unusually rich in fat and albumin.”  Major plantings of soy were undertaken in Hungary and France. 

M. Roman, a French agronomist and engineer, predicted “it may be in the future become as important an article of good as the potato.” [”Scientific Miscellany” Cheyenne Daily Leader (September 7, 1881), 3.]  American knowledge about Asian employments of soy beans was laughably miniscule in the 19th century.  Commentators presumed the Chinese made a bean soup of them, because that’s what everybody does with edible beans. In the Western states where newspapermen had peeked in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants and spotted tofu, they reported “the Chinese use them for various kinds of cheese.”

The primary interest of the earliest growers of “Japanese Peas” was as fodder.  Soy grew on marginal soils, was productive, and livestock that grazed on it thrived. These facts were established in the very first grow-outs of the 1870s. 

Systematic collection of the Asian varieties of soy bean in the West is usually ascribed to the Viennese botanist Friedrich J. Haberlandt, who became fascinated with the plant when encountering 19 varieties at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873. A professor at the Hochschule fuer Bodenkultur, Haberlandt exploited diplomatic contacts and the international botanical network to collect more. These he grew out in fields in Austria and Hungary, reporting his results and arguing the agrinomic and nutritional importance of the soy bean in his landmark book, Die Sojabohne (1878). Excerpted and translated, his findings would be republished in the agricultural press on both sides of the Atlantic well into the 20th century.

In the United States prior to the creation of the Agricultural Experimental Stations in the 1880, there was little concerted academic exploration of the soy bean. Individual growers secured seed from seed companies, or fly by night brokers, or from fellow farmers, reported their results in the local agricultural journal, and fed the crops to their cows. Joseph Nielson procured numbers of Haberlandt’s strains in 1878 for grow out in the U. S. and Prof. George H. Cook of Rutgers, who had also seen the Germanic soy plantings addressed a letter in 1882 to The Rural New Yorker making the case for soy. One of the earliest findings was the the various soy varieties were specific to Asian growing zones, and there was no use attempting to grow a tropical soy in New Jersey, regardless of the plant’s reputation for hardiness.

Not surprising it was the work of the Agricultural Experiment Stations, when they came on line, that made the reputation of the “soja bean” in the United States, particularly in the South. Their systematic investigations explained how the root nodules concentrated nitrogen in the soil with an efficiency that eclipsed the cowpea. They argued the healthfulness of the grean plant as ensilage for livestock. They reported on particular varieties of bean in different types of soil. Dr. Massey of the North Carolina Experimental Station in particular became a newspaper and pamphlet evangelist for soy in the 1890s. By the end of the century every southern farmer knew that soy = good fodder.

In the 1800s no seed company specified the variety of bean they offered, selling product under the generic designation “soja beans.” Yet those sold on the West Coast were said to be “locally adapted” and those in the South show to be serviceable to the region by the experimental stations. So those seeking to reclaim heirloom regionally adapted strains will experience frustration. This 1894 catalog copy from T H Wood Seeds in Richmond illustrates how the seeds were sold.

People wishing to learn what happened next to soy—its history in the twentieth century—are in luck. In 2018 Matthew Roy published a history on “The Rise of Soy in America” with the University of Kansas Press entitled Magic Bean. https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/magic-bean-matthew-d-roth/1127425961

Soy has more uses than fodder or green manure. I was curious about the first American recipes speaking of how the beans should be prepared for human consumption. I found them in the November 1872 volume of The Rural Carolinian monthly. Am I in the least bit surprised that they are so unimaginative, only suggesting that you boil them or bake them longer than familiar bean varieties?  I guess it’s little wonder why soy beans never installed themselves directly in the foodways of the region, despite being a lynchpin of southern agriculture.