Tolosna Bean


The beautiful beans pictured above are some sort of Spanish bean called “Tolosna”. Our occasional houseguest, Nance Klehm, gave us these beans from her personal seed archive, along with a few other remarkable seeds we’ll profile as we plant them over the next few months. We’ve promised to save some of the seeds we harvest to return to her archive.

Unfortunately we’ve been unable to find any information on this variety of bean other than a brief mention on a crappy ad-packed website:

“Introduced in the late 1920’s, a beautiful wine red and cinnamon in color. Similar in flavor to the White Aztec bean. A favorite with Chefs in a 1998 taste test.”

What 1998 taste test? Clearly the internet isn’t the place to sort out the many varieties of Spanish beans, so dear readers, if you have any info on these seeds, please let us know. Thankfully the internet does provide us with disco dancing instructions in Finnish, so until we figure out more about these beans you all can work on your moves:

Leave a comment

4 Comments

  1. It’s wonderful how the language of disco is just so universal. I understood exactly what Mr. White Pants was saying, and I don’t even speak a word of Finnish.
    Will you be selling posters of that luscious bean photo?
    I love your website.

  2. The word Tolosna doesn’t sound even vaguely Spanish. Perhaps it’s from Catalan or some other also-ran Mediterranean language. What it does sound a little like is Russian, or another Slavic language. It would be written Tolosno, but the final O would sound like an A. Wonder what the bean’s true origins are…

    -Kate

Comments are closed.