Beans!
Beans are, depending on whom you ask, a magical fruit, a musical fruit, or even a “mystical fruit” [citation needed]. Technically, beans are not fruit at all, but occupy a vegetal family known as legumes or pulses.
Beans are an excellent source of protein, iron and of course, fiber. From the National Health Service website:
Pulses are the workhorse of the modern homo sapiens diet. But despite their proletarian image, I’ve leaned in to loving beans. The most luxurious form of bean, is the refried bean. Whether they be pinto or black bean, the velvety texture of refried beans is so good. Two weekends ago, for the first time in years, I made a quesadilla, smearing La Preferida refried beans on both sides of the tortilla with a healthy sprinkling of Weyauwega shredded cheese (the best! never settle!) in between, along with a slathering of Yellowbird serrano condiment I picked up at the Austin airport last summer.
The experience of eating that quesadilla was, in a word, sublime. The melted cheese blending into the refried beans, offset by the tang of the hot sauce… mama!! It took ten minutes to make and tasted better than any of the baroque magazine recipes I’ve tried my hand at in the past year. (It also could have helped that I’d taken an edible two hours earlier.)
To me, refried beans are God’s proof that eating can still feel luxurious, even (and especially) when you’re broke. A column by San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho about this concept has stuck with me. Ho writes about “the amount of imagination it had to take for the first Filipino cook to turn U.S. Army base refuse — pig’s head — into sisig, the now-classic of Kapampangan cuisine, or for Javanese people to turn the garbage from tofu production into tempeh. There’s that aspect of cooking that feels like magic, like spinning straw into gold.”
In 2020, the humble pulse is getting a facelift (beanlift?). The New Yorker declared in its latest issue: “Improbable but undeniable: beans are having a moment.” Bean-centric recipes abound (next on my to-make list: Deb Perelman’s recipe for pizza beans). One new status marker for the Millennial gourmand is membership to the Rancho Gordo Bean Club (currently not accepting new members).
In recent weeks, my thoughts have been occupied by one special bean in particular. Over the holidays, a close friend told me she’s having a baby, who she and her husband have started calling Little Bean. It got me thinking about how we all start out that way — just beans spelunking in our mothers’ wombs. Take a moment to appreciate the bean that you once were, and the bean you are still becoming.
Every day, in every way, I;m thinking about thos Beans.
xoxo,
Emma
P.S. My pal Max Read was kind enough to share his recipe for refried beans for this newsletter:
I bought a hunk of slab bacon at the farmers market, cut up half of it into big cubes and browned them a little bit. I added an onion cut in half, a bell pepper cut in half, some celery sticks, and some crushed garlic, then added beans and water and cooked till done. Meanwhile I cut the other half of the slab into strips, cooked those and ate them with breakfast. I sieved and reserved the bacon drippings. When the beans were done, I heated up the lard in a big skillet and fried the beans in that (basically just dumping beans and some of the water together in the pot and letting the water burn off). Immersion blender till they hit the consistency I wanted. I removed the onion and celery and pepper from the pot, but was not religious about removing the big bacon hunks, which created a very, very rich refried bean.
Lovely. Thanks Max!
Did you enjoy reading my thoughts about beans? Forward this email to a friend. Better yet, subscribe to my Patreon to contribute to my bean fund! Or just tell me about your favorite bean/bean-centric recipe.