Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 February 1896 — New York’s Bean Queen [ARTICLE]

New York’s Bean Queen

“The Bean Queen” she was crowned by the newspaper men of Park Row years ago. and the wish is dally expressed that her reign may be prolonged for many a year to come. Bean Queen is very fleshy and dark-skinned, a shining-eyed and Ivory-toothed spedmen of the good old Southern cooks who flourished hi what she herself called “those ante-bellum days before the war.” Mrs. Cunningham has reigned for twenty-live years in the kitchen of a Park Row lunchroom that wa* a favorite resort of Horace Gree ley and other old-time journalists. Her specialty is the baking of beans in both Boston nnd New York stylos. The lunchroom is famous for its beans, 'three hundred and fifty pounds of beans are served at this place for the six working days of the week and 150 pounds on Sundays. Mrs. Cunninghan; therefore bakes to a crisp brown 2.250 pounds of the leguminous esculent each week. The yearly consumption has been, therefore, 117,000 pounds, or 53’/ 2 tons, and at the same rate the twenty-five years she has been (coking them there have been dislns’ out 1.537’/-! tons, or 2,925,000 pounds, sufficient to erect a monur/mt of beans higher limn the Pulitzer Building.