potonthefire

by Pot On The Fire Free(Lit)

  Looking back on my initial experiences cooking, I suspect that the major reason I let the dish slip out of my repertoire was that I didn’t ever truly understand what I was doing. Transfixed by the bottle, I never spent much time thinking about the point of what was going on inside it. Or, rather, I all too readily thought that this was entirely obvious: the point of cooking was to keep their flavor in.

  At its simplest, which also seems to be at its most traditional, the dish contains only five or six ingredients, depending on whether you decide to cook the beans with salt: fresh white Tuscan or cannellini beans, olive oil, sage leaves, garlic, and water. Many Italians, like cooks the world over, believe that adding salt to the flask will toughen the beans; others (also like cooks the world over) are more sanguine. Here is a representative recipe.

  FAGIOLI AL FIASCO

  (adapted from Anna Martini’sThe Mondadori Regional Italian Cookbook )

  [serves 4]

  ¾ pound shelled fresh cannellini beans or ½ pound dried cannellini beans, picked over, washed, and soaked for 8 to 12 hours

  cup extra-virgin olive oil

  2 cloves garlic, crushed

  5 or 6 fresh sage leaves

  salt and freshly ground pepper

  Drop the beans into a large Chianti flask, the straw wrapping removed and reserved, or some other wine bottle. Pour in the olive oil, the crushed garlic, the sage leaves, a little freshly ground pepper, and 3 cups of water. Stuff a plug made of the straw wrapping or a wad of cheesecloth into the mouth of the bottle. This should be loose enough so that steam can slowly escape.

  Place the wine bottle on smoldering charcoal embers or in a slow oven and cook for 3 hours, or until all the water has evaporated and the oil has been mostly absorbed into the beans. Empty the flask into a preheated serving bowl. Salt to taste. The beans can be eaten as a meal in themselves or served as a side dish. They are equally good hot or cold.

  When, recently, Matt and I came across some very handsome-looking dried cannellini beans at our supermarket, I found I wanted to bring them—and beans baked in a flask—back into our daily eating. By mutual consent, the glass vase remained firmly categorized as a flower and not a bean container—we had a very nice, and nicely smallish, locally made bean pot to serve instead.

  However, as I began to cook them in it, I discovered that, no matter how careful I was, the beans tended to break apart. I love to cook them until their interiors are silky smooth, but I also want that tiny resistance as the skin bursts in the mouth. When the beans are allowed to fall apart during cooking, their insides disintegrate into mush. Was there any way to cook these beans so that they would stay whole and yet be rendered completely tender? It was this question that brought back my memories of —and sent me digging through our collection of Italian, and specifically Tuscan, cookbooks.

  In Italy, “Tuscan” is nearly synonymous with “bean eater.” When Waverley Root notes inThe Food of Italy that

  the bean is ubiquitous in Tuscany. There are bean antipasti; beans in soup (minestrone di fagioli,in which they are accompanied by celery and tomato); beans with rice (riso e fagioli); beans with fish (fagioli col tonno,tuna); and even beans with beans (lenticchie e fagioli,lentils and beans) …,

  he is barely scratching the surface. The Tuscans adore beans of every sort—borlotti(cranberry beans), lentils, chickpeas, black-eyed peas. But it is the cannellini—as you might guess from the fact that Italians also call it the Tuscan bean—that is closest to their hearts.

  One day an idea occurred to me: the fact that Tuscans concoct so many glorious bean dishes might mean that they also possessopinions about the cooking of beans that would be well worth consulting. So, there in Grazietta Butazzi’sToscana in Bocca (one in a series, published in Palermo, devoted to regional Italian cooking, written in the local dialect, but also offering standard Italian and somewhat nonstandard English translations), under the headingFagioli lessi alla fiorentina —perhaps best understood as “How to cook beans as the Florentines do”—I found the following (which I have polished up somewhat from the original):

  To boil beans seems easy, but in order to get excellent results you should follow certain rules of preparation. First of all, when using dried beans, don’t put them in water to soak. On the contrary, they must be put directly on the flame, preferably in an earthenware pot, with a little cold water, some cloves of garlic, and two sprigs of fresh sage. Put some water in a second pot of the same size and set it over the first to serve as its cover. The steam rising from the beans will heat this water, which should then be added, bit by bit, as necessary, when the cooking liquid in the first pot has all but boiled dry.

  The cooking time will depend on the age of the beans, but should take from 2 to 3 hours, always over a low flame. The beans are done when they are on the verge of melting. Add salt only during the last 30 minutes of cooking time. Drain and dress them with olive oil and freshly ground pepper. The same proce dure is to be followed when using fresh beans, except, of course, the cooking time will be much shorter. In this case you can also put in the pot a little olive oil and some peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes.

  At first glance, this method may seem to you, as it initially seemed to me, to have gotten everything assbackwards. In essence, the cook has taken a double boiler and put the beans in the bottom and the hot water in the top—notthe usual way of doing things. However, set this method next to the one for cooking, and the pieces of the puzzle start falling into place.

  Here, despite my infatuation with glass, is the lesson I had failed to absorb during my first encounter withfagioli al fiasco. Just as the dangerous frangibility of the flask commanded attention then, the inversion of the double boiler pushes the cook toward caution, ensuring that the beans receive the most delicate treatment possible.

  Especially if one uses an earthenware pot—which is thought to impart an incomparable flavor to the beans22—the flame must be kept low, and, by letting its contents heat the water in the second pot, which is being used as its cover, one can be sure that this water will remain no more than moderately hot and will encourage the vapors released by the cooking beans to recondense and fall back into the pot rather than escape in the form of steam.

  As this understanding began to shape itself in my mind, I found that certain other confusions were also resolved. Leslie Forbes, whose recipe forfagioli al fiasco inA Table in Tuscany has the distinct feel of personal use, directs that, lacking a fireplace full of hot embers, one should

  put the bottle in a warm place, such as an airing cupboard, the warm place on a stove, or beside the boiler or solid fuel cooker [by which I think she means an Aga].

  Clearly, what she has in mind is not hot butwarm. The other interesting thing about her method is that she calls for an equal weight of water to (fresh) cannellini beans—which, as bean cooking goes, is a very small amount of cooking liquid. Here, too, the idea is to have, at the end of the cooking period, all the liquid evaporated and the beans lightly coated in the garlic-and-sage-flavored oil. Thus do the two Tuscan bean-cooking methods we are discussing draw even closer together.

  Besides the minestrone with beans, there iszuppa di fagioli alla toscana, where the beans are not just in the soup, they are the soup, the only other ingredients being seasonings: salt, pepper, garlic, olive oil. After having been soaked overnight, the beans are cooked, half of them puréed by being forced through a sieve to make the thick soup, into which are put the remaining whole beans—beans in beans.

  — Waverley Root,The Food of Italy

  As I began to work out my own strategy for preparingfagioli al fiasco, I soon realized that this would require several trials, each with its share of errors. So Matt and I arranged that I would cook a single portion of these beans every day in an appropriately bean-pot-shaped coffee mug and eat them for mymerenda, or midday snack. Consequently, for a week or so, when I sat down to write each morning, there would be a mug of savory beans simmering not only in the kitchen but—much more importantly—in the ba
ck of my mind.

  Until now, for us, a pot of beans baking in the oven brought with it the pleasant expectation of a particular meal. My mug, however, was emitting a different and more enticing promise. Flipping through our Tuscan cookbooks, I kept encountering dishes that, on closer examination, turned out to be not so much free-standing recipes as just one more way of enjoying a batch offagioli al fiasco: tossing them with pasta or broccoli or canned tuna; spreading them onbruschetta; turning them into a bean salad with a squeeze of lemon and some raw onion; mashing a portion of them—as Waverley Root directs—into a thick broth for an instant bean soup. Quite conceivably, a cook can put such a pot in the slowest of ovens in the morning as she sets off for work, only to return in the afternoon still happily undecided as to exactly what tasty impromptu meal she will make of its contents.

  Of course, none of this would mean a thing if there weren’t something special about the beans themselves. But there is. Unlike the very similar-looking Great Northern bean (which is often suggested as a substitute), the cannellini responds to such exaggeratedly careful cooking in its own inimitable fashion: it all but melts away. Indeed, the Italian phrase for judging their doneness—disfarsi leggermente—means precisely that: “lightly melted.” Some of them do fall apart anyway, but most remain whole just long enough to reach the mouth, where they then dissolve on the tongue like a cool piece of butter. (This analogy, while obviously not exact, does capture the pleasingdensity of the bean; it melts because it is not already mush.)

  Furthermore, my first bite made me deeply regret that last fall—contrary to my usual custom—I decided not to bring the sage plant in from the herb garden to winter with the thyme, rosemary, and bay in our warm and sunny living room. Sage, it turns out, is an herb favored by Tuscans over almost any other, especially in peasant cooking, the third of a trinity with olive oil and garlic. They especially love what this simple seasoning does to beans, and, indeed, it is a perfect flavor match. Fortunately, I did at least pluck the plant clean and dry the leaves, and that little herb jar suddenly found itself basking in totally unaccustomed regard (although I suspect that rosemary has the right character to replace it in a pinch).

  So it was that the days went pleasantly by as I inched closer to a workable method. Since both Tuscan techniques emphasized slow cooking with just enough liquid to cover, I adapted and melded the other instructions so that this could be done as unfussily as possible. The result, detailed below, is—not at all accidentally—very close to Russ Parsons’s basic bean cooking method (see pages 127–28), with two exceptions.

  First, I further reduced his already low cooking temperature from 250—F to 200—F, thus ensuring that the beans would never boil. Second, both because of that fact and because I was using dried (sometimes,very dried) beans instead of fresh ones, I found that presoaking was absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the beans took much longer to cook and—at least during the early part of their time in the oven—quickly absorbed, again and again, all their cooking liquid.

  I still have not quite managed the trick of getting the beans to absorb all the cooking liquid and the olive oil—perhaps this represents a lack in my technique or perhaps the description is more a shared Tuscan culinary fantasy than it is a realized fact. Practice, I hope, will tell. Meanwhile, here’s our recipe. It is named in honor of our stolid Maine bean pot, which has been delighted to exchange its aura of salt pork and molasses for one of sage and garlic. We hope you’ll find that the results elicit the same response as the one described in a popular Tuscan rhyme—

  Serve such cooked white beans to a Florentine

  And he’ll lick his bowl and his napkin clean.

  TUSCAN BEANS FROM THE OLD CLAY POT

  [serves 2 to 4]

  ½ pound dried cannellini beans, picked over, washed, and soaked for 8 to 12 hours in spring water to cover amply

  ¼ cup robust-flavored extra-virgin olive oil

  2 cloves garlic, finely minced

  3 or 4 sage leaves, fresh or dried

  ½ teaspoon black pepper

  ½ teaspoon ground hot red pepper

  ½ teaspoon salt (or to taste)

  Preheat oven to 200—F. Drain the beans, reserving the soaking liquid. Remove and discard any beans that have failed to rehydrate (they will be distinctly wrinkled and ornery-looking). Put the beans and everything else, except for the bean-soaking liquid, into a small earthenware bean pot (or similar vessel) and stir gently. Pour the bean-soaking liquid into a saucepan and heat to boiling. Add enough of this to the bean pot to barely cover its contents, reserving any remaining liquid.

  Cover the pot, put the beans in the oven, and cook at this very low heat (they should never come to a boil) until they are nicely done, about 4 to 5 hours. Check the water level periodically during the first 4 hours, adding the remaining bean liquid, then plain boiling water, as necessary to keep the beans covered.

  Serve the beans hot or at room temperature, dressed with a little more oil and a squeeze of lemon juice. This amount will provide a side dish for 4 or a meal for 2. Or, if you wish, use the beans as the foundation for one of the dishes listed below.

  Fagioli con prosciutto.In his recipe forfagioli al fiasco inThe Fine Art of Italian Cooking, Giuliano Bugialli instructs that an ounce or two of diced pancetta, good country ham, or prosciutto be included with the other ingredients at the start of cooking. A few links of Italian sausage seem another likely option.

  Fagioli bianchi.Dress the cooked beans with some minced raw onion and olive oil to taste.

  Fagioli al tonno.Flake the contents of a 6-ounce can of Italian-style tuna in olive oil into the cooked beans, dress with minced parsley, and eat as is or toss with a tubular pasta.

  Zuppa di fagioli alla toscana.Use a spatula to work half the cooked beans through a sieve. Dilute, if you wish, with a little boiled water to make a rich broth. Stir in the remaining whole beans and serve in warmed bowls with a dribble of olive oil.

  Pasta e fagioli.Toss the beans with a corkscrew-shaped or tubular pasta. Dress with a minced sprig or two of Italian parsley and, if you like, freshly grated Parmesan.

  Fagioli e broccoletti.Blanch bite-sized pieces of broccoli (or broccoli rabe) until just tender and stir into the cooked beans.

  Fagioli con salsicce.Cut a large onion into small pieces. Heat a little olive oil in a skillet and sauté the onion bits and two or more links of Italian sausage until the edges of the onion are crusty and the sausage is cooked through. Remove and thickly slice the sausage. Spoon out and discard any unwanted fat. Combine the cooked beans, sliced sausage, and the remaining contents of the skillet and serve at once.

  Fettunta con cannellini e pancetta.Spread the cooked beans—mashing them slightly—on grilled slices of Tuscan bread and top with pieces of fried bacon or pancetta.

  Fagioli all’uccelletto(beans in the manner of little birds). There are various arguments as to why the dish has this name, but there are none at all as to its merits—if an Italian cookbook has only a few bean dishes, this will surely be one of them. To make it, simply remove the bean pot from the oven just before the beans are done and stir in 2 tablespoons of good tomato paste or ½ cup crushed canned tomatoes (or, in summer, two ripe tomatoes cut into small chunks). Return the pot to the oven and let the beans continue to cook for another 15 minutes or so, until the remaining bean liquid and tomato have amalgamated into a sauce.Fagioli all’uccelletto in bianco can be made by replacing the tomato with a generous portion of sautéed onion. In either instance, dress the dish at the table with a drizzle of your finest olive oil (Anna Del Conte: “This is the touch that makes all the difference!”) or, for a change, balsamic vinegar (Anne Bianchi: “In certain towns in Versilia [wherefagioli all’uccelletto is considered a local specialty] it is customary to add this just before serving. Try it”).

  A NOTE ON RUSS PARSONS’S

  BEAN-COOKING REVOLUTION

  If you cook dried beans, chances are you know that success depends on your obeying at least three inviolate r
ules, the catechism of which goes like this:

  1. Beans mustalways be presoaked, preferably overnight, but at least brought to a boil and let stand for an hour.

  2. The bean-soaking liquid mustalways be discarded—and, preferably, changed several times during the soaking period—to avoid flatulence.

  3. Salt shouldnever be added to the beans during the first hours of cooking—otherwise, the skins will toughen.

  The gospel of the well-cooked bean: a few food writers have vigorously challenged aspects of this accepted wisdom, but it would be hard to find someone who doesn’t believe any of it. Diana Kennedy, for instance, who famously rails against the first two—don’tpresoak, but, if you must,don’t discard the water—completely accepts the third. And most, myself included, have bought all three hook, line, and sinker.

  Thus, it came with the force of a revelation when, in the February 24, 1994, issue of theLos Angeles Times, food editor Russ Parsons blew the whole business out of the water. Here, in essence, is his refutation of those rules:

  1. Unless they are very old, presoaking the beans accomplishes little beyond saving some cooking time—about a half hour or so—and this at the cost of flavor and texture.

  2. Neither cook nor eater can do much to reduce the problem of flatulence, except to eatmore beans. (The more you eat, the better your digestive flora can handle them.)

  3. Salting the bean-cooking water not only has no effect on the beans’ texture but allows the salt to penetrate the dish better, since the beans absorb it from the start.

  Bean cooks—again, myself included—may find these statements hard to accept, but they are based on extensive kitchen testing, on much interrogating of authorities, and, it must be admitted, on common sense as well. He draws some other conclusions, too: cooking beans in an earthenware pot adds nothing to their flavor; covering the pot with a lid greatly reduces cooking time; and the choice between stovetop and oven cooking is largely a matter of the cook’s convenience.