Single-handedly

Well, I’ve gone and blown out my RSI-afflicted right elbow again, doing yardwork, so I’m not doing a lot of cooking for a few days in order to give it a chance to settle down.  I suspect we’ll be eating plenty of kimchi fried rice this week, and a not insubstantial amount of toast and tea.

I am, however, currently brining a batch of sauerkraut.  I’ve made various kinds of pickles in the past, everything from Sichuan pickled cabbage to dilly beans to gherkins, but this is my first time making sauerkraut on my own.  I assisted with kraut-making a number of times as a child, when my grandmother made it, so it’s not entirely unfamiliar territory.  And indeed, sauerkraut is not one of the world’s more complicated pickles: the ingredients are cabbage and salt, and the rest is the inhuman alchemy of lactobacilli.  At any rate, my confidence has been bolstered by Sandor Ellix Katz’s book Wild Fermentation, and I am plunging forth, with a nice big head of shredded red cabbage sitting saltily in a gigantic pink plastic bowl, doing its best to turn into one of my favorite pickled vegetable preparations.  So far so good.  I’ll let you know how it goes in a week or so.

For the two of you yearning for more of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, here is Chapter 6.

And for those of you who are interested in my nonfiction work, and in what goes on in the teeming kitchen-midden I use for a brain, I’ve begun a little project called Shevangelist.com, which you can best think of, or so I see it, as a combination cutting-room floor and odd-sock-drawer of my work life.  It comes in podcast and print flavors, so you may exercise eyes, ears, or some combination thereof, if that’s what amuses you.

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Samuel? Call me.

I am not inclined, under normal circumstances, to check my web stats or userlogs.  I know I probably should, but as it is, I get around to it about twice a year.  Maybe three if I’m really procrastinating something just as hard as I possibly can.

But I recently did check my blog stats and user activity logs and whatnot for this blog, just to see what the activity’s been like since I resumed posting here more regularly, and was bemused to note that one of the posts that gets the most traffic is an old post on how to wash dishes by hand.  It’s the post that gets the most search engine traffic by far.   At least a few times a day, from the looks of it, someone lands on that blog post after searching on “how to wash dishes” or “washing dishes properly.”

Or, in the case of one obviously harried Googler, “how to wash the dishes properly m*th*rf*ck*r.”  (Naughty word disemvowelled for your work-browsing pleasure.)

A friend of mine wondered aloud whether this might’ve been Samuel L. Jackson, between housekeepers.

(Just in case it was, Samuel, please, in the future, feel free to have your agent call my agent and I’ll get in touch with you directly.  It’s cool.  I understand.)

Which brings me to the burden of my speech here: I never would’ve expected that post to get so much traffic.  Of all the things I could write about, and even of all the domestic-labor-related things I could write about, I must say hand dishwashing never seemed like it would be so popular.  Or a matter on which so many people would turn to Asking Uncle Google, for that matter.

So I invite you, should you have unresolved housekeeping or cookery questions, please to feel free to ping me with them. I can’t promise to have all the answers, but I’m happy to offer thoughts if I have any.  The dishwashing post was the result of a couple folks asking me about it, and it seems to have proven useful, and I’m all for that.

Do please leave comments in the actual blog, though, since I don’t see them if they’re left somewhere on some RSS feed.  People reading this through the LiveJournal feed particularly should keep this in mind, because I’ve noticed that people often leave comments in LJ to posts that do not actually originate from LJ, apparently out of reflex.  But here’s the thing: if you comment on LJ, I will not see it.

* * * * *

I’ve put up the next two chapters of The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, in case anyone has actually been listening to them.  Sorry for the delay in getting these up.

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, chapter 4

The Unauthorized True Story of the Frog Prince, chapter 5

Posted in administrative, blogs, domesticity, housekeeping, how to, podcasts 2 Comments

A Day at the Improv

Recently, I talked about improvisation and its role in menu planning, and I gave a few examples. One or two folks seemed to find it useful to have the examples, so I thought perhaps some more would be useful, too.

I hadn’t done any large-batch cooking-ahead in a while. Sometimes events conspire, and there you are. Also, I had recently surveyed the larder and realized that carrots had been part of my winter produce co-op share for several weeks now, yet I had been failing to cook them up. Similarly, I had elderly shallots that wanted using up before they did something regrettable, and some very freckly bananas, a small mountain of co-op-share apples, and a surplus of eggs.

There were lots of things I could’ve done with all this, but as I thought about it, I realized that what I really wanted were dishes that would keep well and that I would be able to eat off of for several days running. I wanted them to be different enough, one to the next, that I could mix them up and not get bored. And of course I wanted them to play nice with the other things I had on hand, so that I could supplement the make-ahead foods with other things if I felt like it.

Also, we were out of bread.

Obviously, this was going to require a bit of time in the kitchen. Had some of the events that conspired not conspired this weekend, I might’ve cooked all this stuff then, but they did, so I didn’t. Instead I decided I would just take the time — one of the benefits of being self-employed is a flexible schedule — to do the cooking today.

At 7 this morning, I lined the suspects up on the kitchen counter.

Ingredients for today's cookathon

Ingredients for today's cookathon

In the back row, against the wall, starting  from where the seltzer siphon is, L to R: bread flour, all-purpose flour, sugar in plastic bins, on top of them are brown sugar, margarine, whole nutmeg, baking powder, and dry baking yeast.  On the cutting board, clockwise from upper left: orange and yellow carrots, Granny Smith and Pink Lady apples, Apple Pie Spice from Penzey’s, lemons, Morally Superior Eggs from Groovy Free-Will Chickens, celery seed, tofu, bowl containing star anise and dried chilis, bananas, garlic, tin of dried winter savory, shallots, onion, ginger root, boiling potatoes that were a little past their prime.  Not appearing in this picture are a few things like soy sauce, salt, water, and cooking oil.

On the agenda: red-simmered eggs and tofu, banana muffins, carrot-potato soup, apple pie, and a loaf of bread.

To give you an idea of how much time this kind of cooking doesn’t take, let’s see what I had managed to produce by 10:30 a.m.

Carrot, potato, and shallot soup

Carrot, potato, and shallot soup

Lovely easy banana muffins

Lovely easy banana muffins

Red-simmered Eggs and Other Things

Red-simmered Eggs and Other Things

Bread dough rising

Bread dough rising

More than half of the cooking was done, or at least done enough that it could simply sit and coast and do its thing without any real involvement from me.  The soup had been assembled, the red-simmering liquid prepared, the eggs cooked and shelled, the tofu pressed and drained.  I had time to rummage in the freezer to see whether I could make some progress on the Great Freezer Space Reclamation Project of Ought-Nine by finding some things to toss into the red-simmering pot (I did — some strips of uncured pork belly, and some frozen tofu).  I had made my bread dough, baked a dozen delightful banana muffins, cleaned up after it all, and… because even when you are doing a lot of cooking like this, there are always down moments where you have to wait until the eggs are done or the onions and shallots have gotten transparent… I even managed to read two chapters of a book I’m reading for research purposes.

Later today I’ll make the pie crust, then refrigerate it until after my Belovedary gets home, and he’ll help me peel and slice apples for the pie.  This afternoon, after I get some lunch (I think I’ll have soup!) and go for a walk with my dog, I’ll bake the bread, which is having a nice second rise.  And while the bread bakes?  I’ll probably get a little more research done.

And then I really won’t have to cook much for a bit.  Unless I want to.

Which, knowing me, I probably will.

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Among the Bean Eaters, part two

Continued from this post

For me, one of the best bean recipes is one of the sparest, at least in terms of ingredients and procedure: black soybeans with seasoned tamari.  I was introduced to these long ago, by a lover who cooked them for me when I was sick with a head cold because the Japanese hold that black soybeans are good for coughs and sore throats.
The beans are simplicity themselves, cooked, as is traditional in Japan, with a small piece of kombu or dried kelp. You can get kombu at Asian markets or many whole-foods or health food shops; it often comes in large sheets which you will be best able to cut with a pair of good sharp kitchen shears, but sometimes you will find it pre-cut either in strips or little twists.  Any format is acceptable.  Wipe off the whitish surface salts with a damp cloth to forestall any grit, and into the cooking water it goes, right along with your picked-over, lightly rinsed dry black soybeans.

The Japanese swear by kombu to make beans more easily digestible, and it also adds naturally-occuring glutamate compounds which enhance taste. These kombu glutamates are the very things that monosodium glutamate (MSG) was synthesized to replicate, and I find that there is a subtle but noticeable difference in the taste when I cook beans with kelp and without it (try it both ways and see what you think).  Simmer, but do not boil, the beans for between an hour and an hour and a half, tasting them periodically after an hour to see when they have gotten to the point where they are almost tender all the way through.  When they are almost tender, but taste very slightly uncooked, turn off the heat and let the beans slowly cool to room temperature without stirring them.  The residual heat will finish the job of cooking them, but because they are not being jostled by boiling or mashed by stirring, they should remain beautifully whole, looking like plump shiny black river pebbles.

While the beans are cooling, heat some tamari or a good full-flavored soy sauce in a small saucepan.  When it reaches a boil, add several healthy pinches of shaved dried bonito flakes, which are available in the same places you buy kombu.  Let it cool until the beans are done cooling, then strain the fish shavings from the liquid. (Don’t waste the now-sodden bonito flakes.  Eat them tossed with some small cubes of well-drained tofu, it is delicious.)  Pour the flavored tamari over the cooked, still-warm beans.  Toss them gently, and serve. Optimally, eat them on a northbound train, with your fingers, from a plastic dish that you have been handed by someone complicated who loves you, on an overcast afternoon in springtime.

If black soybeans in bonito-infused tamari represent the satisfactions of minimalism, moujadarah is more of a come-one, come-all cheap and loveable comfort food.   It is one of the innumerable variations on the theme of beans and rice that exist around the world, and in this case the beans are lentils.  Since lentils require no soaking time, they are a good choice when you want to make a legume dinner without very much advance planning.  That lentils are often the cheapest legumes you can find on the shelves is a positive bonus.

Moujadarah is of Fertile Crescent origin, with versions served from Lebanon to Turkey and probably far beyond.  I have yet to eat one that I didn’t like.  Some, like the Damascus version served in Syria, substitute cooked bulgur (cracked wheat) for the rice that is traditional in the Lebanese version.   Some cooks make the lentils soupier, or cook them long enough that some disintegrate, making a thick, gravylike broth.  Others cook and drain the lentils so that they are relatively dry. As with most comfort foods, the tastes of the cook and eaters are what matter most here, so do not be afraid to experiment.  Over the millennia that this dish has been cooked and eaten, it has doubtless endured far shabbier treatment than it will ever receive at your hands and been none the worse for wear.

In some moujadarah recipes you will find it indicated that the lentils and grain are to be cooked together in the same pot, others do it separately.  Where fuel costs or availability are an issue, cooking them in the same pot is economical.  Where this is less of a concern, or the aesthetics of perfectly white rice are paramount (cooking beans of any kind in the same pot with rice will color the rice, which some people feel makes the rice appear “dirty”), cooking them separately is perfectly fine.  Because lentils cook more quickly than many other kinds of legumes, you will likely want to start the rice and lentils at about the same time if you cook them in separate pots.

What makes moujadarah special, and not merely a heap of grain with lentils on top, is the flavoring that is added to the lentils and the traditional topping of fried onions.  Many cooking traditions have a habit of cooking spices and aromatic vegetables such as garlic or ginger in oil and adding the results to food to flavor it.  Those familiar with Mexican cooking know the practice as making a sofrito, so popular and so much a part of the tradition that markets catering to a large Hispanic population sell prepared sofrito in jars.  The same basic sofrito technique, with ingredients varied according to the cuisine in question, is used around the world. Indian, Latin American, Chinese, and Caribbean cuisines are just a few of those that use oil to carry the flavors of aromatic vegetables, herbs, and spices, and Middle Eastern and northern African cooks often do the same.

In the case of moujadarah, I like to heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in a heavy skillet, then add a good amount of freshly roasted crushed cumin, usually roasted in the same frying pan but while it is still dry, removing the cumin seeds and putting them in my mortar and pestle to crush them a bit while the oil heats.  A pinch or two of ground coriander and fenugreek usually follow the cumin into the hot oil, and as I stir them and enjoy the wonderful smell that results I add as many cloves of minced garlic as I think seemly.  I cook this until the garlic is aromatic but not browned, then turn off the heat.  I cook this “sofrito” as the lentils reach doneness, so that I can drain the lentils and pour in the still-hot oil and spices immediately, the better to let the flavors penetrate. I usually add some salt at this point, too.

To finish off your moujadarah, you want fried onions and plenty of them.  Yellow or white onions will do, it hardly matters.  Peel and dice them and then saute them in hot olive oil until they are beginning to brown, but do not caramelize them.  It is perfectly fine if some of them get crispy as long as they do not become burnt.  In fact, I think crispiness a perk, both in terms of flavor and texture.  If you’re a dab hand at deep-frying, it’s a great way to cook the onions; crispy deep-fried long shoestrings are a great textural contrast to the lentils and rice.

To serve the moujadarah, make a bed of rice and top with lentils, or, if cooking in one pot, just dole out the well-stirred, well-seasoned contents.  Placing a layer of fried onions on top is the final step… unless you choose to gild the lily the way some of my Lebanese friends have done and further adorn the moujadarah with a sprightly chopped mixture of fresh tomato, peeled and seeded cucumber, and parsley.  One Lebanese restaurant I used to frequent served theirs with a black-pepper, cumin, and cucumber-laced labneh, or strained yoghurt soft cheese, on the side.  It was a delicious cool creamy contrast to the moujadarah, very similar in sensibility to the Indian custom of serving raita (also yogurt-based) alongside spicy dishes.

But all of that is lagniappe.  Moujadarah is delicious and the lentils keep beautifully, getting tastier day by day as they sit. I do not enjoy the texture of rice that has been refrigerated—it gets gritty and chalky and the flavor and aroma vanish.  This is one of the reasons I cook my lentils and rice separately. When there are leftovers, I combine the lentils and fried onions and stash them away, then make a bit of rice when I am reheating the leftovers or before I pack some of them up for a brown-bag lunch.

The same general principles hold for red beans and rice, which are essentially the New World equivalent of moujadarah: a substantially seasoned dish of legumes cooked with spices, onions, and garlic, and either served over or mixed into rice.  Unlike moujadarah, I always cook my red beans a day in advance if I have the chance, partly because they take a longer cooking time and partly because it’s just not as good any other way.  The way of making red beans and rice that I describe here is essentially a Louisianan method, but there are many others: if this one does not appeal to you, you might seek out some of the Latin-Caribbean influenced methods.  The Cuban recipes I have tried, particularly, were well worth it.

Begin with soaked red kidney beans, drained and simmering in a nice fresh pot of water with a bay leaf or two.  Beans should always be just submerged while they are cooking to tenderness, so do not hesitate to add more water if needed. Boiling water from a kettle is best so that it doesn’t take long to come up to the heat level of the big pot.  While they are cooking, prepare a saute in olive oil (or bacon fat if you have it) of equal volumes of diced onion, green bell pepper, and celery.  This is the “trinity” of Louisiana cooking that seasons almost all Acadian or Cajun dishes, so don’t skimp.  When this is all well-sauteed and limp, and the beans are tender to the tooth, stir the sauteed vegetables and their cooking fat into the beans.  Add as much garlic as you like, either chopped or minced, some dried thyme, and a teaspoon or so, or to taste, of a good spicy “Cajun spice” blend that is either one you have tried before and liked (Zatarain’s brand is a traditional New Orleans favorite) or that you have made yourself to taste.

Simmer this until the beans begin to fall apart.  The ideal texture is creamy and thick, some of the beans disintegrating, others whole.  If you like, you can also add some nice uncooked chunks of andouille sausage, smoked ham hocks, or some other smoked pork to the beans, but it’s hardly necessary.  You also may decide that adding meat to the dish steals the spotlight. It certainly raises the dish a bit on the food chain to add meat, and it is traditional, but it’s plenty tasty on its own so the meat question is entirely up to you. Do remember to cook it a day prior to when you plan to serve it, though, and serve it over a nice bowl of long-grain Carolina rice.

If you then serve it forth with some hot cornbread, and a relish tray with homemade bread-and-butter pickles, spicy pickled okra, and meltingly tender pickled pearl onions, you not only have a meal fit for the king or queen of a better place and a nobler time, but precisely what I was once served—in a Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen on a cold, snowy day when the sky was drooping under the weight of iced curdled clouds—by a homesick Louisianan who was trying to heal a broken heart.  If I helped a bit by glorying in his red beans and rice, I’m glad; he looked fit to bust his buttons when I asked for the recipe.  (I should caution the reader, however, that in my experience attempting the classic rebound romp directly after such a dinner is ill-considered. This is not merely because of the drama that may be generated when things go hump in the night, but because red beans and rice, especially with plenty of fat chunks of andouille, makes a mightily filling and heavy meal.  I am living proof that it is in fact possible to have some pretty good sex while fighting postprandial torpor all the way, but waiting is easier on the constitution, and if it allows cooler heads to prevail, well, I for one can only encourage it.)

Myriad other recipes from around the world follow a similar format to red beans and rice.  Beans are nothing if not forgiving.  Swap the red beans for black turtle beans, use plenty of fresh cilantro and a few spicy peppers to flavor the cooking liquid, enhance with heaps of sauteed onion, garlic, and celery, then garnish with lime juice and it’s Cuban black beans.  Mix the black beans with white rice and it becomes moros y cristianos, Moors and Christians.  Add more water, or perhaps some stock if you happen to have it, and it’s black bean soup, with or without a supplement of spicy chorizo.  Cook the soup down until it is a thick paste and it is a supremely tasty black bean dip or spread, suitable not just for tortilla chips but for main-dish dining, scooped up with bits of flat bread or pieces of raw vegetables.  Whatever you do, as long as you remember that the secret to keeping your black beans black is to cook them in the same water you soaked them in, it will be gloriously dark, rich, nourishing stuff that just gets better as you make your way through the potful.

This is the most consistently impressive thing about beans.  They turn even an indifferent cook into a profitable alchemist. A squeeze of citrus juice from that forgotten half a lemon in the back of the vegetable drawer elevates the flavors of many bean dishes—lemon with white beans, lime with pinto or black are great.  Orange or grapefruit sections and maybe some diced avocado in one’s stewed red or black beans are sublime.  By adding water as you reheat your beans on successive days, they can be stretched seemingly forever if one needs must, turning from beans to bean soup, then later on, if things are really tight, to bean broth.  A handful or two of pasta, rice, barley, or even cubed stale bread will add bulk and stretch out a pot of broth. Add a smear of leftover tinned tomato, and perhaps the scrag-end of a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, and a reasonably filling and nutritious meal can be coaxed even from bean broth so dilute you can really only call it broth out of courtesy. With luck none of you reading this will never quite get to a place in your life where such measures become a long-term necessity, but it does give some comfort to know that when it comes to keeping the proverbial wolf from the door, you can always rely upon your magic beans.

Still, it bears repeating that beans have more than economy to recommend them.  This is proven nowhere so well as in cassoulet, the French country dish that, to me, is the essence of late autumn as it tips forward into crisp, sere winter.  The French, who seem to love a good food turf war almost as much as they love a good labor protest, nurse longstanding grudges about just what constitutes le vrai cassoulet, and depending on whose recipe you consult you will variously find ingredients like lamb, tomatoes, bread crumbs, duck confit, bacon, salt pork, pork ribs, several specific types of sausages, and so on.  The six things on which everyone seems to agree are white beans (navy beans or cannellini work just as well as flageolets), duck meat, garlicky pork sausage, onions, garlic, and a bouquet garni.  Everything else, and I do mean that quite literally, is up for debate and is your decision to make: you could easily make a different cassoulet every chilly month of the year for several years running and never make the same cassoulet twice, just trying to figure out what your favorite cassoulet might be.

Cassoulets can be outlandishly dear—those crocks and tins of duck confit do not come cheap, especially in the USA—or relatively inexpensive.  It pays to bear in mind that cassoulet, like most bean dishes, is peasant food, and began its life as a way to make something tasty and fuel-efficient in preparation out of what little was available to a French peasant in the middle of the winter: preserved meats (sausage, duck confit) with dried beans and long-keeping root vegetables.  In the twenty-first century, and in America, our circumstances are rather different.  We don’t generally slaughter and butcher our own food animals, nor preserve their meat for later eating, among other things, so we are unlikely to have a midwinter stash of sausage and confit on which to draw.

But an economical cassoulet is still possible if you’re willing to be a little multicultural about it.  If you live near a Chinatown or a good Chinese market, you will very probably have a source for reasonably-priced roast duck. Half a duck is quite enough for a large cassoulet.  If you cannot get prepared roast duck, though, you will have to roast your own.  If you can afford it, it is hardly what I’d call a hardship to have to eat half of a duck, then make a cassoulet with the rest, but if you cannot afford it and you still want to try making a cassoulet, buy a smoked turkey drumstick or a pair of smoked turkey wings.  They are inexpensive, and you will get a very good cassoulet out of them.  In a pinch, you can even use smoked ham hocks.  I have, more than once, and it tastes fantastic.

Similarly, resourcefulness in the sausage department will serve you well.  Since the saucissons a l’ail of Toulouse or even Paris are likely not to be available to you, and if they are they will be outrageously expensive, find someone who can sell you some good locally-made honest German knackwurst (also spelled knockwurst), which will contain copious quantities of garlic, or alternately, some Polish garlic kielbasa, or whatever you can lay hands on that is reasonably similar.  Most European countries have evolved some variant on the garlicky pork sausage, and given that they’ll be spending a number of hours braising with other things in a cassoulet, it matters fairly little which sort you choose.

You will want to assemble other things to put into your cassoulet.  Carrot or parsnip in large chunks and tiny trimmed turnips often make cameo appearances.  Onions are mandatory.  A whole peeled onion studded with a dozen or so cloves is a traditional component, but if you don’t care for cloves, just toss in the onion, or perhaps a liberal scattering of peeled pearl onions.  Garlic cloves can be added whole, as they will cook long and slow and become sweet and tender.

Finally you will require a bouquet garni, ancestor to what some Americans will recognize as the “soup bunch,” a bundle of strongly-flavored herbs and vegetables that are tied with string, submerged in a soup or other long-cooking dish, then retrieved and removed before serving.  To make a bouquet garni, take a rib of celery and clean it, then cut the stalk in half so that you have two “canoes” of approximately even lengths.  Into the “canoes” you pack a few big sprigs of thyme, several nice big sprigs of parsley, and perhaps, if you’ve got one around, some strips of leek (the tough green parts you can’t eat directly are fine in this capacity).  If you are lucky and have some salad burnet or savory, they go well in a bouquet garni also.  Place the two “canoes” together so the stuff you’ve packed inside is trapped between the two celery stalks, and tie it all together with a piece of kitchen twine.

From here, the method for a cassoulet is simple.  Soak your beans, then bring them to a boil for 10 minutes, then drain them.  A cassoulet is not made on the stovetop but in the oven, so get a great big ovenproof pot or casserole dish—the word “casserole” is derived from the “cassoule,” the French earthenware dish that is used for making cassoulet—and heat it in the oven on a medium-low heat.  Melt a few tablespoonsful of lard in the bottom of the pot after it has gotten good and hot in the oven, or else use a similar amount of olive oil, and add the diced onion and whatever root vegetables you favor, stirring to coat with hot fat.  Then add your beans, garlic, bouquet garni, your clove-studded onion if you are using one, and enough cooking water to cover the beans by about an inch.  Reduce the oven heat to low, about 225 degrees F is good, and cook for two hours without stirring.

When this first cooking period is done, add the duck (or substitute) and the sausage, cut into chunks.  Put it all back into the oven.  Every twenty minutes or so for the next two or three hours, go in and use a long-handled wooden spoon to poke the crust that forms on the cassoulet back down into the bubbling beans.  If your beans should start to look too dry as you go, add a little water, a cupful at a time, stirring between additions, until it looks right again.  If they look too soupy, just let them continue to cook, and they will dry out by and by.  The key is for it to cook long and gentle, unmolested by too much stirring, so that all the flavors have plenty of time to marry.

Finally, at the end, you will remove the cassoulet from the oven and take the bouquet garni out of it, then take it to the table and serve it for a leisurely weekend midday meal with crisp cool Riesling or a good hoppy beer, crusty bread and green salad with just a bit of vinegar, oil, and salt, possibly followed by a bite or two of a big pungent cheese and a few slices of hard, tart apple. For dessert, I recommend a long convivial tramp out in the blustery wind and fallen leaves until it turns almost, but not quite, completely dark, and a return to a warm house that still resonates with garlic and pork and the happy laughs of your fellow bean-eaters.

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Among the Bean Eaters, part one

I’m very busy right now with other writing, and hundreds upon hundreds of pages of research reading for the book I’m currently working on.  But I have, it seems, had probably two dozen conversations with friends over the past few weeks about beans.  So it seemed like a timely thing to pull an old essay — not published elsewhere, just not written recently — out of the files and set it forth here.

Someday soon, I hope, I will have time to address the burning topic of What To Do When You Have Just Gotten Another @!$@%*&$!! Cabbage In The CSA Box.  But for today, and also for some other day this week, you get beans.

* * * * *

“Beans, beans, the magical fruit,
The more you eat, the more you toot.
The more you toot, the better you feel,
So eat some beans with every meal!”

At the time that I found myself obliged, for reasons of student poverty, to begin eating beans and plenty of them, this verse was virtually all I knew about things leguminous.  I had not been raised as a bean-eater.  Green beans were one thing, and we had plenty of those, fresh from my grandmother’s garden when we were lucky.  But legumes, the kinds of beans that stand somewhere between vegetable and starch, were not a regular feature on the menus of my childhood.  We sometimes had canned baked beans, which I liked, or kidney beans or chickpeas in a salad now and then.  Upon occasion there would be an exciting visit to a restaurant for what passed, in the 1970s, for “Mexican” food, including a dab of smooth, heavy, often cheese-crusted refried beans.  But aside from these, I managed to reach adulthood knowing, if you will, not a hill of beans about eating beans, and even less about cooking them.

Then I went to college.  As an undergraduate and a music major to boot, I was—as is traditional—basically penniless.  While I lived in the school dormitory this was not such a big deal, cafeteria food being plentiful if not necessarily aesthetic.  But then I moved out of the dorms.  Squeezed by Boston rents on the one side, and a despondency brought on by too many meals consisting primarily of Top Ramen or peanut butter on the other, I realized I was going to have to find some ways to broaden my culinary repertoire without adding to the grocery bill.

I also wanted, and needed, to get some more protein into my diet.  Somehow, I had the innate suspicion that eating meals consisting of prepackaged fried noodles swimming in a broth of MSG might not be providing adequately for all my nutritional needs. But meat was too expensive.  It would be years before I would be able to actually confront the question of cooking cuts of meat in my own kitchen.  At the time, all I could afford was the occasional fish, bought whole from the stalls in the Haymarket or the tanks in Chinatown.  I had learned to clean and dress fish on fishing trips with my father as a teenager, so I would take them at home and, to the horror of my housemates, scale and butcher them in the kitchen sink so that I could keep all the edible scraps.   After I dressed them out I would make stock with the scraps, heads, tails, and fins, while I cooked the filets or steaks.  I’d eat the meat on the first day and possibly the second, make hash with the leftovers on the third, and when the hash was gone, take the stock out of the battered Chinese takeout container I’d frozen it in and add celery, onion, and rice to make soup.

Fish, along with eggs and cheese, were my primary sources of protein… and I couldn’t always afford them.  I had not yet had my Tofu Awakening, and the myriad soy-protein goodies now available had not yet come onto the market. Soy protein remained a murky mystery lurking in the bottoms of big white plastic buckets in the reach-in coolers in the baffling, tempting markets in Chinatown. In those days of fifteen-dollar-a-week grocery budgets, I was not keen on experiments that might prove inedible.

Finally I turned to my 1975 Joy of Cooking, purchased on a remainder table in Harvard Square for $1 because some browsing oaf had broken the binding.  Right there in the first chapter, “The Foods We Eat,” was my answer: beans.  They were cheap, they were easy to get, they had lots of protein, and best of all, the wonderful Rombauers had provided oodles of recipes.

Standing on the precipice of what I was afraid would be the most flatulent summer on record, I went to the store and spent five dollars on dried beans.  (Five dollars, for the record, still buys a simply enormous quantity of dried beans.)  Then I began working my way through the dried bean recipes in the Joy.  Over the next months I made sixteen out of seventeen.  The process filled me with glee. Cooking dried beans, you see, was a fantastic magic trick.  With only water and heat and maybe a few vegetables or seasonings, a thirty-cent plastic bag of tiny rocklike objects turned into a pot full of food.  The only reason I did not try the Joy’s seventeenth recipe, “Campfire Beans,” was that a campfire on my fire escape seemed likely to draw unwanted attention from the fire department, or at least the landlord.

In the process of eating up all those beans I learned many things.  One was that you could cook beans without salt pork or bacon or any meat whatever and have them turn out just fine.  Another was that the Joy was awfully skimpy on the garlic and spices, whereas I liked bolder tastes.  Perhaps not so bold as to become a devotee of the Rombauer’s lentils with prunes, which was so contrary to my tastes that I actually decided I could afford to waste the money I’d spent on the ingredients and consigned a good two-thirds of it to the trash.  But garlic and onions at least were cheap and easily doubled.
I also learned that I truly did like beans.  Beans, I decided, had acquired a reputation far worse than they deserved.  They failed utterly to transform me into a giant fiber-fueled Hindenberg nightmare, a fact I didn’t even really notice until a summer job co-worker eyed my luncheon Tupperware of kidney beans, tomatoes, chiles, and rice and promptly began urging a “magical fruit” sing-along.  I rolled my eyes.  I’d been eating beans for a month, and I remained both unbloated and socially acceptable.

Truth is, the body becomes accustomed to the fiber and complex starches of large quantities of vegetables and legumes, just as it does to the less challenging diets most people seem to consume on a regular basis (diets which, it must be said, have their own gastrointestinal pitfalls).  Perhaps it is markedly different for some folks with less robust digestive tracts or ones dependent on a more highly processed diet, but I’ve simply never had a big problem with beans, and in the years that have elapsed since my first foray into the world of cooking and eating dried beans and peas and such, I’ve noticed that in cultures where beans play a large role in everyday eating, cultures as different as Japan and Honduras, they don’t have the same tee-hee factor attached that they do in North America.

I suspect that for most Americans at least, the fear of doing what Dante so picturesquely described as “making a trumpet of one’s ass” is a mask for a colder, deeper fear:  the fear of poverty. Beans generally and dried beans particularly are often viewed as penitential to prepare, unpleasant to eat, and resolutely lower class.  Few people, unless they were reared in a food tradition where legumes were a staple—say that of the working-class rural South, where stewed pinto beans are a universal favorite from east coast to west—grow up thinking of beans as something they would eat or serve by preference.

Even when grappling, as I did for a while, with the kind of poverty that all but mandates a beans-and-rice-centered cuisine, many people simply won’t go that route.  To continue to spend the money on higher-status foods is to continue to assert a certain claim to belonging to a higher socioeconomic stratum.  There’s a reason that “bean-eater” and “beaner” have been mainstays of name-calling in a number of places around the world: it means you’re a poor schmuck who can’t do any better, that you come from a whole class of poor schmucks who can’t do any better, and probably you’re ignorant, gauche, illiterate, and graceless too.  We see it even in Annibale Carracci’s famous painting of a sixteenth-century bean-eater at his rustic table, spoon poised, eager to gulp down the kind of humble food—beans, bread, onions, rough red wine—to which the painter’s patrons would almost certainly have taken affront had it showed up on their own tables.

Annibale Carracci, "The Bean Eater" (circa 1580-1590)

Annibale Carracci, "The Bean Eater" (circa 1580-1590)

This is largely still true today.  For middle- and upper-class foodies and health-food fans, home preparation and unprocessed ingredients have become the seal of gastronomic authenticity as well as the hallmark of good nutrition, and some beans, particularly those with gourmet cachet—flageolets, favas, various heirloom varieties prized for their rarity—are considered fashionable and desirable.  But most beans, for most people, are just things that take a long time to cook and which must be substantially processed at home are just an inconvenient pain, something you don’t do if you can afford not to.
Being an enthusiastic and unrepentant bean-eater thus can require a bit of fortitude, if only because other people cannot be trusted to treat your leguminivorous ways as anything other than raw material for fart jokes.

Personally, I find that the best defense is an irresistible offense.  If the beans are tasty enough, they become the most reasonable and defensible thing in the world.

Fortunately this is simple.  For all their humbleness, beans, with their seductively comforting combination of starch and substance, are intrinsically delicious.  Beans are easy to cook, requiring only soaking and simmering to be edible.  They will accept virtually any seasoning with grace.  They can form the backbone of savory dishes or sweet ones.  Beans can take nearly any role in any meal, literally from soup to nuts.  But it is also true that not all bean recipes are created equal.

… to be continued

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