A Simple Pot of Beans

Dec 21

If pale beans bubble for you in a red earthenware pot, you can often decline the dinners of sumptuous hosts. - Martial

Whenever I feel uninspired in life, I re-read Tamar Adler’s book An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace. It helps me to see everyday things with wonder again. (Yep: one of my main sources of literary and life inspiration is a book about leftovers.)

Adler’s evocative, humorous, and luxuriant writing about food, and cooking, and eating, and friends, and travel, helps you to see the joy and potential to be had around your kitchen, and in your daily life. And in whatever is in the fridge right now.

I am not an intuitive cook. I’m not someone who can see a bit of this, and a smidge of that, and magic up a savory dinner. At least that’s how it seems to me, like magic. My husband and daughter, who are intuitive cooks, can do that. Me, I do much better with recipes. An Everlasting Meal is not really a cookbook, although there are some recipes in it.

Tamar Adler is also an intuitive cook, as well as a professional chef: for you farm-to-table fans, in the noughties she cooked at Chez Panisse. After re-reading An Everlasting Meal, I assess the jars of olive brine in our refrigerator door, those ones with three olives left, with newly speculative interest.

Nevertheless, one of my favorite things to cook from An Everlasting Meal is Adler’s straightforward and simple pot of beans.

But oh, what beans!

I love making things that partner with time and sometimes even partner with microbes, like soups, and pickles, and sauerkraut. And I love making things that make thorough use of whatever is in my refrigerator. The living eat the living: and I do not like to take the life of a plant or an animal for my dinner, and let it go to waste.

I love making things that simmer, things where the flavors mix and meld over time. Above all, I like making things that are forgiving.* (I admire the focus and precision of good bakers, but I am a cook. It is impossible to rescue a burnt cookie. But you can do quite a bit to re-engineer a soup.)

When the weather broods with freezing rain, there is nothing better than to have a companionable pot of beans, fragrant with olive oil and aromatics, simmering on your stove.

Okay, But Beans? Really?

Adler points out that most people have not have the experience of eating flavorful, well-made beans (she compares this to judging Bach after having only heard the Goldberg variations played on kazoo).

And then, as Bart Simpson delights in reminding us, there are potential digestive repercussions. These are neutralized by soaking your beans overnight:

What gets flushed out of the beans on their overnight wallow is what inspires musicality in eaters. Feed their soaking water to your plants, who will digest it more quietly, if you like. (Adler 2012, p 106)

I love winter because this is the best time for my favorite kind of steamy, aromatic cooking: soups, and stews, and garlicky pots of beans … something bubbling on the stove, or maybe a chicken roasting in the oven.**

Because I am a compulsive systematizer, I took part of Adler’s chapter about beans and extracted a recipe. This is what I consult when I want to make beans.

I took much (but not all) of the poetry out of Adler’s mouth-watering chapter on the glory of home-made beans, “How to Live Well.” (Adler 2012, pp 105-115).

But if you want to try them out, here you go:

Yes, Really: A Simple Pot of Beans

(recipe and all quotes below cadged from Tamar Adler, “How to Live Well,” An Everlasting Meal, pp 105-109)

Time: A night to soak them; two to three hours the next day to simmer them.

Ingredients:

2 cups of any kind of dried beans (except lentils or split peas, which cook much faster)
Water
Scrips and scraps of vegetables and aromatic herbs, such as onions, carrots, celery leaves and stalks, parsley stems, garlic cloves, thyme, fennel fronds, leeks
a generous pour of olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Instructions:

Soak beans overnight “from sunset to sunrise.” (Add two or three inches of water over the tops of the beans, so they have room to expand. Discard any that are floating.)

Drain and rinse your beans. Cover beans by two inches of fresh water in a cooking pot. (Adler says the beans need to look like they are bathing, but not swimming…)

Add some salt to your water, enough that you can taste it; but just below the point where it tastes like “pleasant seawater.” (That’s for pasta, Adler says.)

Add vegetable scraps and herbs. “These odds and ends are as crucial to pots of beans as fresh water. Your pot will benefit from a piece of carrot, whatever is left of a stalk of celery, half an onion or its skin, a clove of garlic, fibrous leek tops.” I usually throw in some onion, carrot, celery, garlic cloves, parsley stems, a bay leaf, sprigs of thyme, fennel if I have it, and freshly ground pepper.

Add “an immoderate, Tuscan amount of olive oil.”

As soon as the pot boils, lower to a simmer for two to three hours, until the beans are done.

When are your beans done? *** Adler says they are done when five beans taste tender. If you can’t spoon up five tender beans, they need a little more simmering time: “Beans are done when they are velvety to their absolute middles. You should feel, as soon as you taste one, as though you want to eat another.”

Oh. And beans make their own sauce!

The broth is their sauce. Don’t discard it! Scoop out the vegetable scraps if you like, but keep your beans and broth together.

So You Cooked Yourself a Simple Pot of Beans: Now What?

Beans keep for about three days in the refrigerator, in their broth. After that, you can freeze them. Beans and their broth freeze well.

Adler’s suggestions for how to eat them:

Make rice and pour your beans and broth on top.
Mash some of them and turn them into the base of a soup.
Warm the beans in a pan and crack an egg over it.
Eat them with bread and wine.
Eat them with corn tortillas and beer.

We often make ours into a soup, but sometimes I just have a hearty scoop of beans and broth for lunch, drizzle some more olive oil on top, and dip a piece of sourdough toast in it.

Good stuff.

References

Adler, T. (2012) An everlasting meal: cooking with economy and grace. Scribner.

‘Martial’ (2021) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martial&oldid=1044647984 (Accessed: 20 December 2021). (Note: I am not sure which book this epigram of his came from; I remember reading this quote in a cookbook once. But Martial had lots of business dinners with sumptuous hosts: he relied on patrons for his writing income.)

Beans, Beans The Musical Fruit (no date) Simpsons Wiki. Available at: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Beans,_Beans_The_Musical_Fruit (Accessed: 16 December 2021).

Simple Roast Chicken with Lemons (no date) Williams Sonoma. Available at: https://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/simple-roasted-chicken-with-lemons.html (Accessed: 21 December 2021).

What to Use Instead of Pie Weights (no date) The Spruce Eats. Available at: https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-to-use-if-you-dont-have-pie-weights-1388014 (Accessed: 20 December 2021).

Notes

*Speaking of cooking things that are forgiving: Did you know rice cookers will cook any kind of grain? Grits, barley, oatmeal…? And it always comes out perfect? And never burnt? And it will stay warm until you remember you were cooking something? Because I am so distractible, I have spent more time than I care to admit scouring burnt rice from the bottom of my cooking pots… but no more.

** That roast chicken with lemon and thyme recipe, linked above, hits all my high notes: easy, forgiving, outstanding, just a few ingredients, and you can use the chicken all week to make other meals.

*** Adler writes, “The best instruction I’ve read for how long to cook beans comes from a collection of recipes called The Best in American Cooking, by Clementine Paddleford. The book instructs to simmer ‘until beans have gorged themselves with fat and water and swelled like the fat boy in his prime.’ The description is so perfectly illustrative I don’t think anyone should write another word on the subject. I don’t know who the fat boy is, but I feel I understand his prime perfectly, and it is what I want for my bean.” (Adler 2012, p 108)

**** Neither you, nor I, nor dried beans, are immortal. If you want beans that still have vitamins in them, cook your dried beans within a year. If you have dried beans that are too old to cook, use them for pie crust weights. Yeah, I said earlier I don’t really bake… but I do make quiche. With frozen pre-made pie crust.

Anna Havron