Sometimes you just get caught up in the flow of things. Sometimes the tide of events overwhelms your normal good sense and you go along for the ride. Sometimes you don't even regret it when it's over.

So it was with the Great Bean Pot Adventure at my house a a while back. Let me tell you about it.

If you've found my articles on this lonely outpost on the Web, then you might already know that I have A Passion for Beans--Really!. I really like beans and everything associated with them (well...almost everything). It came to my attention as I was gathering information for my Bean Lovers Web site on Suite 101 (where this article originally appeared) that there is such a thing as a bean pot. Oh, I had always known there were bean pots out there, but I had never paid much attention to them and never really thought of them as playing a part in my life. In fact, we even have a bean pot in our cupboard that--until this adventure--we had never used. (Even though we managed to break the lid somewhere along the line.)

Suddenly, now that I had become aware of bean pots as a necessity in the well-equipped bean lover's kitchen, I had to have one. One with a lid. One with character and charm and history and mystique. You see, I wanted--no, needed--to bake our family's treasured baked beans in a bean pot of my very own.

Where do you go to buy a bean pot?

Good question. I suppose that kitchen specialty stores might have them, or perhaps places that sell crockery would. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to spend pounding the pavement to find such an item. I'm a computer geek, an Internet junkie; why should I have to leave home to buy a bean pot?

Indeed. So I fired up my favorite Internet search engine and searched for the words "bean pot." I got a list of dozens of fascinating-sounding recipes involving bean pots, but no actual purveyors of bean pots. Ah ha, it seems that bean-pot sellers are not big on e-commerce yet.

But I didn't give up yet. (Of course, I wouldn't--not with dozens of other search engines at my beck and call.) I had this idea. I had recently discovered eBay, home of the Internet auction. When I needed a leather coin purse to replace my last one, which had died after long use, I found several wonderful coin purses on eBay and bought them. Why wouldn't someone be selling a bean pot or two on eBay?

Oh, of course, they sell bean pots on eBay.

They do indeed sell bean pots on eBay. They sell them every day by the hundreds. I've been monitoring the bean pot market for six or eight weeks now, and I can tell you the market is brisk. At any time, an eBay search for bean pots will return around 300 items. They range from (allegedly) genuine antiques selling for $150 or more to little pots no one has had any use for, selling for $3 to $5. (But watch out for the shipping charges! Bean pots take big boxes with lots of packing to ship, and they're heavy. Even the most fair-handed seller is going to have to charge you a hefty amount to ship the thing to you.)

I had some strong ideas about the kind of bean pot I wanted. Our baked beans are so popular that we never make a single batch, and often go as high as tripling or quadrupling the recipe. I needed a bean pot that would hold a lot of beans--two quarts at least, more if possible. This eliminated 80 percent of the pots right off the bat.

It was great fun to shop through the list of those that remained, looking at the pictures, trying to determine if the pots were big enough, considering the prices, and so on. For a decision of this importance, I had to bring in my wife. With her veto of several that I liked, we settled upon a half-dozen acceptable candidates. We bid on them one or two at a time. (We would hate to have won the bidding on six of them--I like bean pots, but I probably don't need that many.)

The bean pot arrives.

Soon, we had won a bean pot. We paid the small amount we had bid, and in no time at all, the bean pot arrived in the mail, well packed in yards upon yards of bubble wrap. I was thrilled with it. We immediately set about making a pot of baked beans, which were much more impressive and perhaps even more delicious when baked in and served from a genuine, certified, A-1 bean pot.

It was so much fun that I went back to eBay for another one. (Some might suspect that I'm easily pleased...) As I shopped for the bean pots the first time, I saw that traditional New England bean pots are brown, glazed, tall, and round, with a handle (or two) on the side, reminiscent of the honey pots that Winnie the Pooh is always seeking. Since my first bean pot was non-traditional, with a western-themed design, I decided I must also have a traditional Winnie-the-Pooh model bean pot.

It didn't take long to find and successfully bid for just the right pot. As the proud owner of two complete bean pots (and one with a broken lid), I can categorically state that I am now closer to being a certifiable bean lover. And, believe it or not, beans really do taste better from a real bean pot.

If you would like to approach nearer to bean lover's nirvana, too, zip right over to eBay and run a quick search for "bean pot." The variety of wonderful cooking and serving vessels for beans is staggering. Soon you, too, can be the proud owner of a bean pot.

Editor's Note: This article was originally written in 2001. Since then, more bean pots have arrived at the Mann family home. I am working on a Part 2 to this article to tell you more about bean pots and the things I've learned from narrowly escaping becoming a bean pot collector.

Copyright © 2006 Richard Mann. All rights reserved. Please contact the author for permission to use this article (includes reprints in mailing lists, newsletters, and/or any other purpose/format) and give details of its proposed use. Any and all use of this article in any way without permission is prohibited under copyright law. Acceptable use: Please feel free to link to this page.

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