You Don't Know Beans

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But you probably do know a little about them, even if it’s just those sad cans of beans and franks at the supermarket, or the kidney beans that show up in chili, or the tomato-sauced ones that appear at summer picnics.

Beans taste best cooked from scratch, but when Mom and Pop both work, this appears to take too much time. I used to be in this boat, but I was also in the boat with the folks who don’t get paid much for their 40 hours a week, so I couldn’t easily leave beans out of my weekly grocery equation. They were and are cheap food that is good for you and your kiddies.   (Way back, when I first learned about bean cookery, we lived in the back of beyond, so there was no fast food temptation around—not that there was anywhere the amount of what foodie Michael Pollen calls “corporate food” in supermarkets and beside the highways to expand everyone’s waistline.)  

I’d make a big pot on Sunday, using bones and drippings from our once a week chicken. In the fridge, those beans would last for days to be reheated and served in various combinations. They might be curried, dressed with sunflower seeds, chopped apples and raisins and poured over rice, or chili-peppered and served, with a little ground meat and cheese, over spagetti. 

Nowadays, I start my beans with a good wash in a strainer, followed by a hand sort—back in the good old days there was sometimes rat poo as well as stones and dirt in among the beans.  (Blessedly, it’s been several decades since I’ve found this unsavory additive.) Then, put them to soak overnight.  You may add bay leaves now, onion flakes, pepper, dried celery and other aromatics. Originally, back in my wood stove days, I’d just put them straight away onto the back where it was warm, not hot, and leave overnight.  

If you want to hurry the process, you can boil for five minutes, then cover and let them stand for an hour. After, you discard the water and begin again—especially if you are feeding someone who complains that beans make them gassy. This parboiling will hasten the cooking process.  (BTW the more frequently you eat beans, the easier they digest, as your body learns the trick.)

But all that basic advice may be found on the back of the bag or in your "big fat" cookbook. There are many kinds of beans, and they'll give you a world tour of eating—and that’s the interesting part to me. Currently, I’m working my way through several different kinds, because each lends itself to different recipes.

 

Kidney beans, big and red, can be cooked and used cold in green salads. If cooked with onion, garlic, oregano, and chili powder, and mixed with browned ground meat and onions to make chili. Red beans cook faster than pintos, but likewise can be used for refritos—mashed with a wooden spoon and cooked again in oil in a heavy pan, you’ll end with a basic south-of-the-border taco stuffing.  

Limas, a.k.a. “butter beans” in this neck of the woods, fresh or dried, are delicious when cooked slowly in chicken stock, with celery, onion and parsley. They make their own creamy sauce.   
Split peas and lentils cook fast. The former are made to be cooked with a ham bone, a pig’s foot, or just lots of carrots, potatoes and onion.  The yellow and red varieties are delicate and will cook to a mushy nothing if you aren’t careful.  Yellow lentils, mixed with yogurt and curry powder, approximate Dal, an Indian favorite. 

Black beans lend themselves to cooking with a Spanish or Portuguese flare. Cook them with tomatoes, garlic, onions, and a big squeeze of fresh orange juice.  Serve over rice and alongside more of those cooked greens--only this supper time you'll be dining in Brazil instead of the Deep South.

Black-eyed peas and white beans are still the darlings of the south, especially good cooked with pork odds and ends and accompanied with dishes of greens and cornbread.  Cooked white beans (or pintos) can go into the bottom of a well-oiled iron skillet, covered with a cornbread mixture and then baked into that original hand-held American take-out food, the venerable cornpone.  

 

 

I think you'll be surprised if you give some of these recipes a try at how good the humble bean can taste. You can make them over the weekend, freeze what you don't use, and/or just dip into the pot for a couple of days as we used to do until they are gone. Your budget will benefit, too.

 

 



~~~

 

Juliet Waldron

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MOZART AND THE WRITERS

Written a very long time ago, but something to say on the occasion of another  notable January Birthday, that of Wolfgang A. Mozart, a fellow I liked so well he appears in three of my books.

Mozart sends telepathic messages!

 

I saw this headline in the '90's, in one of those papers where Bill Clinton could be seen  shaking hands with a friendly alien.

 

As a Mozart fan, however, I understood it to be true. After Amadeus, there were legions of us, out of the classical closet. We saw the play, then the movie. We began to collect Mozart music. CD and videotape were still new, and so we had to buy those and the new, and, in those early days, expensive, equipment. My poor vinyl collection took a back seat to digital perfection. I searched in for small businesses that would carry opera tapes. I volunteered constantly at my public radio station because they were kind enough to feed my Mozart frenzy on a daily basis.

 

I was not alone, however, in this mad Mozart revival. Every opera singer with a recording contract put out a Mozart album. Neighbors in posh NYC apartments sued neighbors after hours and hours and days and weeks and months of The Requiem played continuously and at full volume. Like so many phenoms, Mozart had surged over the top, infecting the planetary consciousness.

 

Love me! Love me! Listen to me! Do what those 18^th Century fools did not!

 

  

The single party I gave every year was to honor his birthday. My writer and poet friends, all of us struggling with manuscripts, attempting to find agents and publishers, to hold onto  day jobs, were loyal attendees. We could share our woes with that mostly impractical, humiliating, and perilous passion for writing.

 

I will always be grateful to those brave souls who drove through snowstorms from other states because they wanted to be in my kitchen, share their woes and then find a way to laugh about them.  It was a fun fellowship in the gray cold January world.

 

There was champagne and 18^th Century food of all kinds, steak and kidney pies, syllabub, etc., prepared, over the course of days and after trips to the butcher and the import shop, by the hands of Juliet the Certifiable. The Cake came from a now OOB bakery called Dingledein's, who certainly knew how to make a Mozart's Birthday Party Cake.

 

A warm winter pick-me-up among friends!

 

So, Happy Birthday, creator of musical joy, Wolfgang A!  

~~Juliet Waldron

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For Hamilton's Birthday/Nevis, 1957

 

 

It was 1957 when Mom and I traveled to Nevis.  It was January, which is the best tourist weather in the Caribbean, with lots of sun. We flew up from Barbados to Antigua and then on to mountainous St. Kitts on the old British West Indian Airways aboard a  D.C. 3. We trundled along slowly, carefully skirting majestic cumulus.  Flying was a less exact process in those days, and deep in the innards of those big clouds, dangerous turbulence could be hiding.

I was pretty excited, because we were going to see the place where my hero, Alexander Hamilton, had been born.  Mom said there probably wouldn’t be much to see but the island itself, however, she too was curious about this (then) rarely visited speck in the West Indian sea. Honoring Hamilton, I knew, was a kind of family tradition. My Grandfather Liddle--who was  a college professor and sort of the Obi Wan Kenobi of the family--particularly admired this Founding Father. 

After a foray into the musty interior of a used book store, my mother had been approving when I’d arrived at the cash register with Gertrude Atherton’s 1902 “dramatic biography” (a.k.a. heavily fictionalized) of "Great Alexander" in hand.   The elegant Edwardian prose went straight to my head and I was soon convinced that Alexander Hamilton was the most romantic, as well as the smartest, hardest working man among those geniuses who’d shaped our early republic.

On our way, we'd stayed overnight in St. Kitts.  I remember that as one of the coldest I ever spent in the West Indies. Our plane was supposed to leave in the afternoon for Nevis—there were two ways to get there—on a ferry or in a small plane—but I was famously sea-sick. The plane was the smallest on which I’d ever flown. A full load was four passengers and a pilot.  

We arrived at the airport –which was just a tin-sided, palm-frond-roofed shelter—and then waited and waited. The little plane (probably a modified Super Cub) was in parts in a shed next to the runway, because “somethin’” was not right”. My mother and I both grew anxious, as you might imagine. I sat on a wooden bench cradling Mrs. Atherton’s book.  I was by now well on the way to memorizing it.

Finally, we took off, even though the sun was going down. The other passengers, used to West Indies travel, made graveyard jokes, but falling out of the sky into the ocean didn’t really seem possible to me, not when I was on the verge of my Nevis epiphany.  Half an hour later, we arrived—landing on an island which is little more than a mountain whose cloudy head juts from the sea. 

 

The runway was grass. Men holding poles with flaming, kerosene-soaked rags wrapped about the tops illuminated our landing area.  A couple of bounces later, we were down. Then another wait, until a couple of taxis appeared to take us all into Charlestown.  

At the guest house, lit by kerosene lanterns, the gray-haired proprietress, looking as if she’d stepped out of the 1920’s, in a dowager’s ankle-length dress and long pearl necklace, took one look at us and said she didn’t allow children—“especially not American children” in her house. Looking around the room, with lots of antimacassar-backed chairs and delicate side-tables, every surface of which was covered with china figurines, I had a notion of what she was worried about. 

Mom put on her most glacial demeanor and said that I was a perfectly well-behaved only child who spent all her time reading and who would certainly never enter the good parlor unless invited to do so.  “And besides,” she added, “I have brought her all this way from New York State to see where her hero, Alexander Hamilton, was born. Show her your book, Judy.”

I held out the beloved book for the old woman’s inspection.

“Ah,” she said, examining the cover. “Why, it’s Mrs. Atherton!"

“I can’t stop reading it," I said. "Hamilton goes with me everywhere.”

For the first time, she smiled. She extended her hand and said, “Come with me, my dear, and I’ll show you my very own copy of that book.”  And sure enough, she had the only other copy I’ve ever seen.

 Now, we were welcome, for our hostess proceeded to explain the kerosene lamps which lit the scene.

“From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. we have electricity; afterward we use these. It makes for early nights.” I've learned since that Nevis had acquired its first generators in 1954, just three years earlier. What seemed like scarcity to us was luxury to these islanders.

The next day, we contemplated a heap of stones by the harbor said to be the remains of the Hamilton house. We bathed in the hot springs in our swim suits where you paid the man who hung around there. After, he'd walk you to the hollows where the water steamed, warning you first about which pools would scald you. The gravel-bottomed ponds were shaded by a grove of towering palm trees. The brilliant green ferns and delicate flowers clustering about the “baths” were the lushest I’d ever seen.

One day, we traveled up the mountain to see the ruins of some of the old plantation sugar mills. We particularly admired one that had been turned into a hotel. Here we met the owners and enjoyed lunch. Clouds regularly gathered around the top of the mountain every afternoon. We were up so high here that when these soft clouds enveloped us, we were at once bathed with a surprisingly cool tropical rain.

On other days, we went swimming from a beach of brown sugar sand. We weren't keen to swim too far out into that mysterious gray-blue water, either, as there was often not another soul around for as far as the eye could see.  

It's been a good many years since that visit, and Nevis is no longer so far off the beaten-tourist-path.  Alexander and now his beloved Betsy too are remain with me. I'm more than happy to revive (and share) memories of that mysterious, cloudy-headed island and of this long ago visit.

~~ Juliet Waldron

See my historical novels at:  http://www.julietwaldron.com
and
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS