Bean and Legume

Ranch Style® Beans are Min’s number one foolproof side dish for instant satisfaction every time. She says that if Andy Warhol had been a Texan, the Ranch Style® Beans can would hang in museums throughout the world. The chili pintos’ unmistakable label dressed in basic black with bright white Western lettering and yellow and red accents is as common a sight in Southwestern pantries as Campbell’s tomato soup ever was. These well-seasoned beans make an “appetite pleasin’” homey cornbread casserole with any leftover cheater meat.

No matter how much you like to cook, everyone gets stuck in a rut. When you find yourself making the same old things, it’s time to cook out of your comfort zone. For us, this means a trip to any international market where one step inside we remember how much there still is to learn. The good news is that walking the aisles of the unfamiliar unlocks the secrets to many of the ingredients in our favorite restaurant dishes. The greens in the produce section alone will keep us busy for a year. We can’t shop when we’re hungry, so first we eat. Thankfully, the Vietnamese noodle bowls right next door energize and inspire our international shopping trips. Vietnamese noodle bowls are filled with contradictions in complete agreement—hot and cold, crunchy and soft, sweet and sour, rich and light. The bowls of warm thin noodles, cool leafy lettuce, bean sprouts, and herbs topped with any meat or seafood you like are perfect for leftover cheater meat. The sweet/salty/spicy dressing may appear way too complex for home cooking. It’s not. The international market has everything you need. Cooking out of your comfort zone will help you dissect the components and flavors of unfamiliar foods. Even if cooking Vietnamese at home sounds daunting, give this a try with leftover cheater meat just for the fun of better understanding how opposites get along.

When you’re finished slicing and chopping a smoky beef brisket, what’s left on the cutting board are the coveted crusty, juicy bits called the burnt ends. In beans, burnt ends add robust, meaty flavor just like a ham hock, a hunk of salt pork, or bacon. Here the bits of barbecue and meat juices are tossed in with canned white beans that have been doctored up with the regular barbecue sauce ingredients. We add pretty much any cheater BBQ meat scraps to canned pork and beans, too.

After moving to Tennessee, R. B. discovered that his favorite baked bean cooked without molasses was actually white. Simple white beans flavored with salty local country ham are a favorite at Nashville’s famous “meat and three” restaurants and at catfish joints all over Tennessee. A big slice of white onion on the side is a must. The other popular white bean garnish is a spoonful of sweet-savory chow-chow (cabbage relish). Chow-chow is available in the pickle section of Southern supermarkets.

It’s no big deal to make a pot of real “baked” beans, especially if you forget about the baking part and use a slow cooker. The only work is cooking the bacon and onion before dumping everything into the crock. Boston beans have lots in common with barbecue. The vital ingredients—molasses, mustard, onion, and bacon—are the same components that impart the barbecue balance of sweet/sour/savory in sauces. In the slow cooker, the beans finish up just as thick and dark as any from Boston.

Barbecue gets along with any bean cooked with a little onion and garlic, including black beans. Cuban Black Beans with a touch of sherry are especially well suited for Cuban Fingers (page 176) with Ultimate Cheater Pork Loin (page 80). Serve the beans over rice or add some water or broth and turn them into a soup dressed with fresh parsley, chopped onion, chopped hard-cooked egg, and a dollop of yogurt or sour cream.

Back in the 1970s before the whole world was a mouse-click away, Min’s grandfather, Lee Almy, a guy who took his beans very seriously, had pintos shipped down to Carlsbad, New Mexico, from Cortez, a small town in the prized pinto-bean-producing southwestern corner of Colorado. He flavored these superior beans simply with chili powder and salt. Min’s dad, Max, adds a can of Rotel tomatoes and a leftover hambone when available and simmers them in a slow cooker. Min’s aunt Betty is a purist and cooks her pintos plain, seasoned only with salt and sometimes chopped ham. Aunt Sarah, from a long line of ranchers across Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, cooks pintos the way her mama taught her—unsoaked beans and a hunk of salt pork in the pressure cooker for an hour and a half. Then she simmers them with a little fresh garlic. Whichever way you cook them, serve with cornbread, sliced raw onion, slices of fresh jalapeño pepper, and the cheater meat of your choosing.

Have we cheesed you out? Take a cheese break and try this straight vegetable-bean puree with nutty sweet garlic and smoked paprika. It may not be the lead-off dish to a night of Crock Dogs, but it fashionably introduces dressier barbecue dinners. We especially like it with Tandoori BBQ Chicken Thighs (page 96), Cider-Soy Pork Tenderloin (page 79), House Lamb Shanks (page 128), and Ultimate Cheater Oven-Smoked Salmon (page 132).

Deep in the Gothic tangles of the Aspromonte sits the fourteenth-century Santuario della Madonna di Polsi, a refuge culled by an ancient order of cloistered sisters dedicated to the honor of the Madonna, through a life of acetism. Once a year, though, in the early spring, when pilgrims from faraway parishes walk over Monte Montalto to the sanctuary to celebrate the festival of the Madonna, the nuns sacrifice a flock of newborn lambs to the glory of her, braising their flesh in old, shallow coppers and feeding the faithful at long, rough-hewn tables set out on a meadow floor.

Horace, born Quinto Flacco of freed Roman slaves in the sleepy village of Venosa in the north of Basilicata, was educated in Rome and Athens in philosophy and literature and trained as a soldier. It was his poverty, though, that piqued him to write verse. A satirist, a classicist, a romantic, Horace was also a dyspeptic. He sought cures from alchemists and magicians. He journeyed to Chiusi (an Etruscan town in Umbria, fifteen kilometers from our home) to sit his ailing bones in icy, sulfurous baths. But it was this soup of dried peas and leeks, a food of his childhood, to which he paid homage in his works as his only cure. The folk of Venosa present, having little else to claim, make the soup in every osteria and taverna, each cook armed with at least one trucco—trick—that makes his soup the one and only true one. Here follows mine, its only trucco its artlessness.

Creamy evidence of how savory and seductive can be a naïve little pap made from a handful of dried beans.

Made from handmade whole wheat or egg pasta cut into wide ribbons—half of which are sautéed until golden in garlic and chile-scented oil then, along with the poached pasta, tossed with roasted almonds and chickpeas softened in a rosemary, garlic, and bay-scented bath. It is a beauty, the crisp, garlic-scented pasta against the soft, delicate ribbons of it with the mealy, nutty little chickpeas and the bitter almonds stitching them together into a plateful of fantasy conjured from homey stuffs.

II Gran Sasso is the highest peak of the Apennines, surging up from the sea, a beast longer than twenty miles, a great-winged harpy, petrified, iced in flight and leaving only a slender shelf of coastal plain in its wake. And hitched halfway up its magnificence sits the medieval fastness of Santo Stefano di Sessanio. One meets few of its two hundred folk on a Wednesday evening’s sunset walk through its catacombs and labyrinths, peering into the unbarred doors of abandoned houses that spirit up invention and half-light musings. Inside the bar—there is always a bar—a Medici crest embellishing its door, the briscola squad is hard at play. Curious at what could bring us forty-five hundred feet up into the January cold that afternoon, we told them we were looking for lentils. Sometimes I can still hear their laughing. But they found us some lentils, the last of that year’s harvest, they told us, and they convinced us to stay the evening, the night, in a little locanda, an inn, closed for the season but of which one of them was the owner. Of course we stayed and of course we cooked and ate the beautiful black lentils that looked so like a great bowlful of glossy jet beads and of course we drank beautiful wine. And afterward we slept close by the fire. Though it is hardly traditional to adorn this humble soup with cream, when our host offered it with the willowy dollops melting into its warmth, it tasted like a dish as old as the mountains’ secrets. And I would never again eat it any other way. The ennobling of the soup with saffron is common in many dishes of the region but only for these last half a hundred years. Fields of crocus have flourished, though, for centuries in the peculiar micro-climate of the high plains of Navelli and Civitaretenga, since a curious village monk, when sojourning in Spain, folded a fistful of their dried seeds in his handkerchief and tucked them in a prayer book. The monk sowed the seeds first in the monastery gardens, and when the flowers bloomed and he harvested their pistils according to the rites he learned in Spain, he and his brothers planted whole fields of the sweet flowers, desiring to use the saffron as a pharmaceutical and as a colorant for ceremonial vestments. Still, the old monk’s is the only saffron cultivated in Italy.

Perhaps until the beginning of this century, there came always, in the severe mountains of the Abruzzo, a haunting desperation with the first days of May. Bankrupt of the thin stores conserved to abide the incompassionate winter—their handkerchief-sized patches of earth sown a few weeks before—the contadini (farmers) waited then for the land to give up its first nourishment. Often it came too late and many died. And even as time brought more mercy, these terrible days were remembered, the pain of them soothed by a simple ritual. The story says that on the first of May, sette fanciulle virtuose—seven young virgins— went from house to house in a village in the Marsica, the area that suffered most in the past, and begged whatever handful of the winter food that might remain in the larders. And, then, in the town’s square over a great fire in a cauldron, the fanciulle prepared a beautiful pottage to share with all the villagers, to bring them together, to warm them, to keep them safe. The potion was known as la virtù—the virtue. The soup is still made, ritualistically, faithfully, each first of May in many parts of the Abruzzo—most especially in the environs of Teramo, as well as in the Marsica—now more extravagantly, brightening the humble dried beans with spring’s new harvests. Employing even a handful or so of all the ingredients results in a great potful of the soup, assigning it thus as a festival dish. On some sweet day in May, invite twenty-nine or so good people and make the soup for them. The tail of a pig and one of his ears, though they are traditional to the soup, seem optional to me.

This is a substantial soup classically made from fresh fava beans and a dried sort of bean/pea hybrid called la cicerchia, whose taste and texture are very like that of the fava when it is dried. This version, asking only for the dried favas since la cicerchia is not readily found in America, yields a rich, smoky flavor that is wonderful against the comfort of the warm crunch of the bread.

Here is a simple presentation of the components of Rome’s saltimbocca embroidered with spring peas and tomatoes.