SPECIAL REPORT: WHEN WASTING FOOD WAS NOT AN OPTION

By Wayne Knuckles • August 6, 2026

Long before freezers, supermarkets and cans of Del Monte, mountain families figured out how to make an August green bean last until Christmas. All they needed was a needle, some thread, a warm dry place and a little patience. First of a three part series.

There are foods whose names tell you exactly what you're getting.

Fried chicken. Apple pie. Mashed potatoes.

Then Appalachia gives you leather britches.

The first time somebody hears the name, food is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. You might picture an old fellow coming down off the mountain wearing buckskin trousers and carrying a squirrel rifle.

But leather britches are green beans.

More precisely, they are green beans that have been dried until they become brown, shriveled and tough-looking, then brought back to life months later in a pot of water, usually accompanied by a generous piece of pork.

And somewhere along the way, those ordinary beans become something quite different.

Picture an Appalachian garden in August.

The bean vines have gone wild. Half-runners, greasy beans and other pole beans are coming in faster than the family can eat them.

Today we'd blanch the extras, seal them in freezer bags and stack them beside the frozen pizzas.

A century ago, that freezer wasn't there.

So somebody sat down with a bowl of beans, a needle and a long piece of thread.

The beans were strung together, one after another, into long garlands. Those strings could be hung near a fireplace, in a smokehouse, on a porch or anywhere warm and dry. Over time the pods lost their moisture, wrinkled, darkened and curled.

To somebody looking at a row of them hanging there, they apparently resembled little pairs of dried leather pants.

Leather britches.

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English records the term at least as far back as 1913 and describes it as particularly associated with southern Appalachia. The food is also known by several other names.

In much of Kentucky, you'll hear shuck beans or shucky beans.

Whatever you call them, the idea was the same.

Get the water out of the bean before the bean goes bad.

Mountain people didn't invent drying food.

Human beings had been using sun, wind, smoke and dry air to preserve food for thousands of years before anybody drew the boundaries of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia or North Carolina.

Beans themselves were being grown and preserved in North America long before European settlers arrived.

What Appalachian families did was adapt those old ideas to the food they grew, the climate they lived in and the tools they had available.

No electric dehydrator.

No vacuum sealer.

No freezer bags.

Sometimes not even a glass jar.

A needle, some thread and dry air would do the job.

It is easy from our world of refrigerators and year-round produce aisles to underestimate what a breakthrough that was.

A bean picked in August normally doesn't have much of a future.

A dried bean could wait for winter.

Something interesting happens to a green bean when you dry it.

It doesn't simply become a preserved version of the fresh bean.

Its flavor changes.

The fresh green taste becomes deeper and earthier. The texture changes too. Even after hours of soaking and cooking, a properly prepared leather britches bean has more chew and character than an ordinary canned green bean.

That is one reason people kept making them even after they no longer had to.

At first, leather britches were about survival.

Eventually, they became about taste.

Anybody who grew up eating them could tell the difference.

That distinction matters because we sometimes talk about traditional Appalachian foods as though people ate them only because they were poor or isolated.

Necessity may have started the tradition.

Flavor helped keep it alive.

There was nothing particularly complicated about making leather britches.

There was, however, plenty of work involved.

Beans had to be picked. Depending on the variety and family custom, they might be strung, snapped or left whole. Then came the needle.

A sturdy needle and strong cotton thread could turn a pile of beans into a long string of them.

For many Appalachian families, this was not solitary work.

People sat on porches or around kitchen tables. Children helped. Grandmothers supervised. Somebody told stories. Somebody complained about the heat.

A job got done because everybody's hands were doing something.

One Appalachian memory preserved from that tradition describes early green beans being prepared with a darning needle and strong thin cotton thread, then hung from nails across the porch until the sun dried them. Once thoroughly dry, the beans could be removed from the strings and stored in large glass jars.

Think about that scene for a minute.

Rows of beans hanging across a porch in August.

Not decoration.

January supper.

Making leather britches took patience.

Cooking them did too.

These weren't beans you dumped out of a can and warmed for five minutes.

The dried beans first had to be washed and usually soaked to begin replacing the moisture they had lost.

Then they went into a pot with fresh water and cooked slowly.

Very slowly.

A piece of country ham, salt pork, bacon or another bit of cured pork often joined them.

Hours later, the hard dried pods had softened. The cooking liquid had picked up the flavor of the beans and pork.

Then came the companions that rarely needed invitations at an Appalachian supper table.

Cornbread.

Potatoes.

Onions.

Maybe wilted lettuce in season.

It was not fancy food.

It wasn't trying to be.

By the middle of the 20th century, rural Appalachia was changing.

Electricity spread.

Refrigerators arrived.

Home freezers became common.

Canning equipment improved.

Eventually, grocery stores offered green beans twelve months a year.

Leather britches should have disappeared.

From a purely practical standpoint, there was no longer much reason to sit with a needle and thread stringing beans across the porch.

But people kept doing it.

Some still do.

That's usually the test of a traditional food.

If people eat something only because they have no alternative, the food disappears when the alternative arrives.

If they keep making it after the freezer shows up, something else is going on.

Memory is part of it.

Taste is part of it.

And maybe there is satisfaction in knowing that a method your great-grandmother understood still works perfectly well.

We tend to talk about old Appalachian foodways with words such as simple and old-fashioned.

Those words can be misleading.

There was nothing simple about feeding a large family through a mountain winter when the nearest grocery store was miles away and the household didn't have refrigeration.

A family had to understand seasons.

They had to know what would keep and what wouldn't.

They had to know when to plant early beans and late beans.

When to pick apples.

When to slaughter hogs.

How long to dry corn.

How much salt meat required.

How hot a canning fire needed to stay.

How dry a bean had to become before it could safely be stored.

Leather britches belong to a whole family of mountain foods that were created because wasting food simply wasn't an option.

Apples became dried apples and apple butter.

Cabbage became kraut.

Pork became ham, bacon and sausage.

Corn became meal.

Green beans became leather britches.

The garden did not stop feeding the family when frost arrived.

If the family had done its work, August was still feeding them in January.

Most of us don't need leather britches anymore.

That's what makes them interesting.

We can buy green beans in February.

We can freeze tomatoes in August.

We can order strawberries in December that have traveled farther than most Appalachian families once traveled in a lifetime.

Convenience won.

It usually does.

But something was lost along the way too.

Not because every old way was better. Plenty weren't.

But the generation that strung beans across a porch understood something worth remembering.

Food was valuable.

A garden was valuable.

And throwing away something you had spent months planting, hoeing, picking and preparing would have seemed almost absurd.

Maybe that is why a string of brown, wrinkled beans deserves another look.

They aren't especially pretty.

They don't photograph like a basket of ripe tomatoes.

They aren't likely to become the next fashionable superfood.

They look, in fact, a little like somebody's tiny leather pants hanging from a string.

Which is how they got that wonderful Appalachian name in the first place.

Leather britches belong to a whole family of mountain foods that were created because wasting food simply wasn't an option.

Apples became dried apples and apple butter.

Cabbage became kraut.

Pork became ham, bacon and sausage.

Corn became meal.

Green beans became leather britches.

The garden did not stop feeding the family when frost arrived.

If the family had done its work, August was still feeding them in January.

Maybe somebody ought to bring the needle back out

Most of us don't need leather britches anymore.

That's what makes them interesting.

We can buy green beans in February.

We can freeze tomatoes in August.

We can order strawberries in December that have traveled farther than most Appalachian families once traveled in a lifetime.

Convenience won.

It usually does.

But something was lost along the way too.

Not because every old way was better. Plenty weren't.

But the generation that strung beans across a porch understood something worth remembering.

Food was valuable.

A garden was valuable.

And throwing away something you had spent months planting, hoeing, picking and preparing would have seemed almost absurd.

Maybe that is why a string of brown, wrinkled beans deserves another look.

They aren't especially pretty.

They don't photograph like a basket of ripe tomatoes.

They aren't likely to become the next fashionable superfood.

They look, in fact, a little like somebody's tiny leather pants hanging from a string.

Which is how they got that wonderful Appalachian name in the first place.

Leather britches.

August green beans that refused to die.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly, The Pineville Sun.Sun

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