Why gourmet beans are worth $4 a jar: The women elevating the humble staple beyond toast

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Amelia Christie-Miller ate her first good bean when she was 21. She was in Spain, studying for a year, and she was also – on this particular morning – badly hungover. 'I couldn't be bothered to go shopping,' she says, 'and all I had at home was a jar of heirloom butter beans.' Specifically, it was a jar of judiónes de la granja, recommended by a Spanish friend.

Christie-Miller hated baked beans as a child but, on this occasion, it was a case of needs must. 'I remember eating one from the jar and thinking: 'Oh my god, this is completely different.' I was like, that is the experience I need to bring to British people!'

And so she did. In 2021, Christie-Miller – who had worked in food sustainability and as a private chef – started Bold Bean Co, a company that sells high-quality beans in Britain. The beans are also (and I know this sounds implausible but it's true) quite glamorous looking – packaged in shiny glass jars, replete with slick, eye-catching labels.

People love bougie beans. On Instagram, Bold Bean Co has more than 50,000 followers and often posts messages from happy, almost delirious, customers. (One reads: 'Why have I become obsessed with beans?'.

Another says: 'Bury me in a vat of these.') Today, Bold Bean Co is stocked in places such as Waitrose, M&S, Sainsbury's and Booths; Christie-Miller, now 30, has employed six more people; and in August the company published its first cookbook, Bold Beans: Recipes To Get Your Pulse Racing (see overleaf). There are more than 90 recipes, all bean-based – from coronation chickpea sandwich to beans alla vodka.

In 2021, Christie-Miller (pictured) – who had worked in food sustainability and as a private chef – started Bold Bean Co, a company that sells high-quality beans in Britain

In Waitrose, a 235g tin of butter beans costs 70p – that's 29.8p per 100g – while a 700g jar of Bold Bean Co Queen Butter Beans is £4, or 57.1p per 100g. Why?

'It's twofold,' says Christie-Miller. First, the selection process. Good beans tend to be big with 'really thin skins and tender centres'. Bold Bean Co grades its products bean by bean and only uses the best ones. 'They're always more expensive, because they grow at lower yields. But they taste a lot better.'

The second cost is time. Most cheap tinned beans are cooked as quickly as possible, then sealed; Bold Beans are cooked for more than 12 hours, to make them more tender, and are constantly seasoned with salt. (The ingredients are just beans, salt and water so the final product isn't ultra-processed. An unopened jar will last five years.) That attention to seasoning means you can cook Bold Beans without any stock, or, like Christie-Miller did on that hungover day in Spain, just eat them out of the jar. I tried this at home, scooping a few cold Queen Butter Beans with a spoon and having them neat. They were lovely.

Last year, the company bought its chickpeas from Spain, black beans from Mexico and runner beans from Poland. When I meet Christie-Miller, she is about to announce the sale of her first British bean: a carlin pea from Lancashire. She is properly excited about this. 'It's amazing – just as good as a chickpea!' she says, eyes expanding. 'Our ancestors would have eaten it, but most Brits don't know what it is. We'd love to see a future where everyone's ordering carlin pea soup.'

Is this the beginning of a bean renaissance? Maybe. 'We always have beans on the menu,' says Farokh Talati, the head chef of London restaurant St John Bread And Wine. The 40-year-old gets a lot of his stock from a bean dealer who drives a van to Italy and picks the best crop from there. 'They are one of the things that you should pay for, like good olive oil is worth paying for,' he says.

This magazine's food critic, Tom Parker Bowles, is also a bean backer, but he doesn't insist on expensive ones. 'I love baked beans,' he says. 'Preferably on toast, with grated cheddar. Or eaten straight from the tin with Tabasco, worcestershire sauce and pepper.'

For something so small, the bean has a big history. According to the food historian Pen Vogler, 56, whose book Stuffed: A History of Good Food and Hard Times in Britain will be published in November, beans were cultivated around the Mediterranean 5,000 years ago, and in Asia even earlier. Take the Romans, who believed beans were 'good for reproduction'. Or the ancient Greeks, who elected public officials by beans: citizens would place either a white bean (representing a 'yes' vote) or a black bean (representing a 'no' vote) in a jar and the number would be counted at the end. If the jar fell over, the election results would be revealed prematurely – it's why we say 'spill the beans'.

We've always liked them in Britain, too, says Vogler. In the earliest English cookbook, The Forme of Cury – written in 1390 by the cooks of King Richard II – the first recipe is for beans. (The first chapter of Vogler's book is also about beans. It includes an adapted recipe from The Forme of Cury for fried medieval bean burgers. She promises these taste better than they sound.)

Other than possibly building our entire civilisation, beans also put nitrogen back into the soil and fertilise it in the process. Stock image used

'In the earliest records in Britain, the broad bean was like bread. It was what you ate if you were anybody,' says Vogler. Wheat wasn't grown as much and people didn't have ovens, they cooked over a fire – which works well for beans. The food was also important for feeding slaves, who, in Anglo-Saxon England, made up about ten per cent of the population. At the start of lent, slaves would be given a ration of around 5kg of beans to last them for 40 days and 40 nights.

'It was the thing that kept everybody going,' she says, quite impassioned. 'We probably owe our civilisation to beans and peas! People would have died in winter otherwise.'

What else? Other than possibly building our entire civilisation, beans also put nitrogen back into the soil and fertilise it in the process. Oh, and they're low in fat but high in protein. And they can grow almost anywhere, from sea level to 3,000-metre altitudes. No wonder the gushing introduction to Christie-Miller's cookbook is written by Paul Newnham, a top food advisor from the United Nations. Whatever the question, says Christie-Miller, 'beans are the answer'.