Within moments of him leaving my side, women crowded in to claim five pounds or five bushels, stuffing handfuls of leaves into plastic bags that we bought at discount because they’d been misprinted. “Tank you!” smeared in red, four times across white bags engorged with produce. “Fred’s Discont Grocer,” “Mike’s Meaatts Welcomes You!”
The misprints didn’t matter either. The women jabbered together and rolled deep laughter over their purchases as they planned for good food and family. Then, while still scrutinizing the spread as if they might have missed a perfect handful of leaves in a bushel basket not yet considered, they’d absent-mindedly hand me their bags to be weighed.
“Baby, how much I got there?”
I’d place the bag on top of the scale and then drag my finger right across the price table, which calculated from fifteen cents a pound all the way up to a dollar twenty-five.
“Four pounds at fifty cents a pound . . .” I’d figure to myself. “Two dollars.”
“What d’you say, Baby?”
We had to pay for our scales to be reckoned and licensed. A man in a nice button-up shirt would come with a briefcase full of weights on the first day of market each summer and examine the front and back panel of the display windows as he gingerly placed two pounds, five pounds, ten pounds in the pan on top. Without fail, he’d renew our machines with an official sticker slapped onto the front. He’d smile, shake hands with us and take our money, gone within moments of appearing, yet the event always caused a nervous stir in my Uncle Butch, which infected me even though I knew that we would never deliberately cheat anyone. My family was raised in the tradition of John Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism; vigorous moral standards were part and parcel to the ins and outs of days. Short-changing people on their vegetable purchases was almost as bad as rejecting the church, and this religious intentionalism was only enhanced by an existence that hinged on the wiles of the earth.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, I knew. There were floods and droughts and there were perfect warm springs and fields made rich from the old swamps of Lake Michigan. There were years with too many locusts, with lightning storms and early frosts that burnt whole fields of tomatoes, but there was always enough food to keep our family far from hunger, so we were in a position to do the giving and not the taking away.
The scales, though, were prized and pricey possessions to be handled with extreme care. Drop them once and they were ruined, rejected by the man in the button-up shirt, thrown irrevocably out of whack, the glass cracked, the mechanics jarred so that no more than half a pound could be correctly ascertained. Sometimes Uncle Butch would shove a screwdriver into the metal guts of an ailing machine, but the prognosis for such a procedure was generally grim. I was therefore not to pick up the scales when they were loaded on and off the truck, my arms too flimsy to be trusted with the weight and investment of the things.
I was allowed only to take bags from customers, place them on top of the scale, figure the weight, and then state the price. “Four pounds. Two dollars.”
“Four pounds? Gimme ‘notha bag. I need more than that. Got the pastor’s family comin’ over for dinner tomorrow after church! Phew! Pastor loves those curly mustids. You ever try those?”
“No.”
“Well, why not? Here, try one. Take a bite.”
I shrugged slightly at the challenge, the picture of nonchalance, then reached into a bushel basket, grabbed hold of a leaf and wiped it off on my money-apron.
“Little dirt won’t hurt you none,” the woman said, watching with a mischievous grin on her big, brown lips.
I nodded and bit down, grinding the green between my molars for a moment with disinterest, but when the taste spread over my tongue I didn’t try to hide my shock and disgust. The woman broke into giggles and those at her elbows looked up to see what was going on.
“Curly mustid,” she said by way of explanation as she nodded at me, and then everyone was chuckling.
“Got a little bite, don’t it?” another one said with a knowing flop of her wrist.
“Yeah,” I said, examining the curly mustard as if to gain a better understanding.
I never imagined that a frilly leaf colored such a happy shade of green could have so much heat and pepper coursing through its veins. This was almost as mean as feeding jalapeños to my younger cousins, but the ladies loved me for my innocence. I was the scrawny farm girl with glasses and freckles and a limp brownish ponytail straggling over ratty work clothes, selling greens, easily coerced into taking big bites of fire leaf. They came back every weekend for years, knowing me as I finished junior high and started high school, knowing me as the girl who sold the mustids and took the food stamps.
“How you doin’, Baby?” they’d say every week. “Mm-mm-mm, look at these greens! I need six pounds. You got any butta’ beans today?”
The markets stretched out across the summer, starting in mid-June when the asparagus and rhubarb and peas were just in, and ending with the last days of October. As the months passed, more and more doors were balanced on bushel baskets and covered with the burgeoning harvest until the frosts set in and the fields went brown. By then, days were so cold that I would wear four pairs of pants to work, making myself sick with all that elastic squeezing at my middle, and five layers of warmth on top so my movements were slow and padded. I despised the taste of coffee, acidic and bitter, but I started drinking it to warm my insides and keep my fingers from freezing on those mornings at the greens table, when I scooped up the leaves myself so the ladies didn’t have to get their hands out of their gloves and make them wet and dirty and cold.
Home Cooking
HOW TO LIVE WELL
By Tamar Adler
From An Everlasting Meal
Tamar Adler’s quirky culinary education has included working under such talented writer-chefs as Gabrielle Hamilton, Dan Barber, and Alice Waters. In How to Live Well, Adler shares recipes, kitchen tips, and a compelling philosophy of cooking as an approach to life.
Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio.
We were better off when things were worse.
—FIFTEENTH-CENTURY TUSCAN SAYING
Beans have always been associated if not with poverty, with the sweating classes. Fava beans, whose slightly bitter flavor is so refreshing it’s common to see them being peeled and eaten raw, were called, in ancient Rome, faba, a play on words with faber, the Latin word for “worker.” The Roman physician Galen said of beans: “Legumes are those grains of Demeter that are not used to make bread.” He then chose them over less wholesome wheat loaves as the staple of Roman gladiators’ diets.
Most of us regard beans with suspicion, as we do stale bread and cooking in water. Prejudices are always best dispatched, but not always unfounded. When food is boiled badly, it’s fair to turn away from it, and if stale bread isn’t cooked with, or toasted, but served dry and harsh, it’s awful.
Beyond the indelible stain the poor little things will never shake, the distaste we feel for beans is not unfounded either. Our beans are rarely as good as they can be. They’re usually so bad, in fact, that basing an opinion of their merit on prior experience is very much like deciding you don’t like Bach after having heard the Goldberg Variations played on kazoo.
I suggest you set your doubt aside, fill a pot with cold water and two cups of dried beans, put it on your counter, and leave it there overnight. You will be on your way toward making beans that taste like that that have fed laborers and fighters for centuries.
You will also have plowed effortlessly through the hurdle of “soaking beans,” a hurdle whose existence and gnarliness is a pure invention of food writers’ proclivities for making cooking seem difficult.
The way to keep bean soaking from getting in the way of your cooking beans is to detach the process from today’s hunger and expectations and pour dried beans into a pot and cover them with cold water whenever you think of it. Their needing to stay where they are until being cooked tomorrow won’t be a p
roblem, and you’ll have soaked your beans.
A lot of bean recipes advise soaking in the refrigerator: beans are vegetables, and warmed too gently in water may think they’re being asked to sprout. I soak mine wherever there’s room in the kitchen, and they keep their vegetal ambitions well in check for a day.
Once the sun has set and risen, drain the beans through a colander and cover them by two inches with fresh, cold water. 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.
If you didn’t put two cups of beans in a pot of cold water last night, get on the bandwagon today by putting them in a pot, covering them with five inches of water, bringing it to a boil, turning off the heat, and leaving them sitting in hot water, covered, for an hour. Then drain them and cover them with new water. This has the same effect as overnight soaking and is a good alternative.
The cooks who make the best beans are the ones who hold simplicity in high esteem. Romans and Tuscans value spare eating and living. Both of their legislative histories are peppered with sumptuary laws limiting the length and content of meals, passed whenever their citizens’ affection for simple living got flabby.
Tuscans, though, make the best beans. They are known in Italy as mangiafagioli, or “bean eaters.” Tuscans believe that frugality is next to godliness and give the humblest ingredients their finest treatment. Tuscan cooks are extravagant with good olive oil, pressed from dark trees, and with vegetable scraps and Parmesan rinds, which, along with salt and more of that fine oil, make transcendent pots of beans.
Those 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. If you must decide what to save for your chicken pot and what for stock and what for beans, save your fennel scraps with pots of beans in mind. I make notes to myself after meals, and there are enough torn pieces of paper attesting that “The best bean broth has fennel in it!” for it to have become axiomatic.
Your pot also wants parsley stems, whole sprigs of thyme, and a bay leaf. It can all be tied into a neat bundle in cheesecloth or with kitchen twine, or it can be left bobbing around, as everything in my bean pot always is.
Beans need salt. There is a myth that adding salt to beans keeps them crunchy and unlovable. Not cooking beans for long enough keeps them crunchy, and undersalting them is a leading culprit in their being unlovable. They also need an immoderate, Tuscan amount of olive oil. This is different from adding oil to a boiling pot of water for pasta. Pasta doesn’t cook in its water long enough to benefit from the oil, and you use only a small amount of pasta’s cooking water to help sauce and noodle get acquainted.
The liquid in a bean pot becomes broth as beans cook in it just as the water in which you boil a piece of meat does. No ounce of the water that goes into a bean pot should be discarded. Tuscan food is based as much on the broth made by the beans on which Tuscans lavish their affection as on the beans themselves. Harold McGee, who writes about the chemistry of food simply, writes that beans make their own sauce. He is right. Their sauce must be well made and it must be kept.
Cooking beans is like boiling a chicken or boiling an egg: only their water boils, and only for a brief second. The rest of their cooking is slow and steady. Light the burner under your beans, and as soon as the pot has come to a boil, turn the heat down to just below a simmer. Gray scum will rise to the top of the pot and gather around the edges. Skim it off and discard it.
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.
As they cook, beans should look like they’re bathing. Their tops should stay under the surface of the liquid, or they will get cracked and leathery, and they shouldn’t ever be in so much water that they’re swimming. Taste their broth as they cook to make sure it is well seasoned. It should taste not like the pleasant seawater of the pasta pot, but like a sauce or soup.
The second good piece of advice from the same book is in one of its recipes for black beans: “Soak beans overnight; drain. Put in pot, cover with water. Add onion, celery, carrot, parsley, salt, and pepper. Simmer until bean skins burst when blown upon, about three hours.” This is the only recipe I’ve ever read that takes the doneness of beans as seriously as it should be taken: a cooked bean is so tender that the mere flutter of your breath should disturb its skin right off.
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. The whole pot is only ready when five beans meet that description. If one doesn’t, let the beans keep cooking. (My “five bean” method is good, but ever since reading Mrs. Paddleford’s book, I feel like a brute when I practice it, and am quite intent, moving forward, on whistling the skin off a bean.)
Cool and store your beans in their broth. The exchange of goodness between bean and broth will continue as long as the two are left together, and the broth helps the beans stay tender through chilling, freezing, and warming up again.
Those are instructions for cooking all beans. The only exception to these instructions is lentils. On the timescale of beans, lentils are instant. They do not need to be soaked and take only a half hour to cook. It is smart to keep cans of cooked beans around, but there is no reason to buy precooked lentils. Cooking them from dried does not take any more planning than putting a pot of water on the stove, lighting a burner, and opening a plastic bag.
Other than how good they are when they’re cooked well, and how many good meals you can get out of them, beans are economical because they’re a cheap habit. I keep an assortment of different beans stored separately in little glass jars. I have jars of little green French flageolets, marsh-brown cranberry beans, inky black beans, turtle beans, speckled Jacob’s cattle beans, and plain burnt umber kidneys.
Pots of beans have an admirable, long-term perspective on eating. It’s the same to them whether you eat them tonight or in three days. Beans get better over a few days’ sitting, gorged and swelled, like happy fat boy. Any longer and you should freeze them, but they’ll thaw ungrudgingly when you want them back.
A bean pot has a lot of meals in it, and you’ve already done much of the cooking you need to for many. A bowl of pasta e fagioli is a pot of boiling water away. Bring a few cups of beans and broth to a simmer in a deep pan or pot along with the rind from a piece of Parmesan. Smash the beans with a spoon as they warm. Cook a short pasta like ditalini or orecchiette until it is still quite firm. When the pasta is nearly done, remove the cheese rind from the beans and scoop the pasta into the bean pot to finish cooking. Serve drizzled with olive oil, and top with freshly cracked black pepper and freshly grated Parmesan.
Simple and delicious beans and rice also only requires that you boil a pot of water and add rice. Warm your beans in their broth until they’re very hot, make rice, and ladle the beans on top. Or, if it’s spring, cook halved little white turnips with their long greens still attached, or English or snap peas in butter and bean broth or water, and cut little wedges of artichokes and cook them in olive oil and butter. When everything is tender, combine it in one big pan, add beans, a lot of broth, and a big handful of whatever soft herbs you have—chervil, chives, mint, fennel fronds, celery leaves—and ladle the bright, springy stew over rice. If you don’t want to make rice, add a little extra butter and herbs to the vegetables and beans and serve it over toast.
A deeply comforting supper for one or two is beans and egg. Warm cook
ed beans in a little pan. Add sautéed kale, or roasted squash, or a little bit of roasted tomato, or add nothing at all. Crack an egg or two onto the beans, cover the pan, and cook. If you have stale bread, put a toasted piece, rubbed with garlic, in each bowl. Spoon the beans and egg over the toast, salt each egg, grind it with fresh black pepper, drizzle the beans and egg copiously with olive oil, grate them thickly with Parmesan, and dine like a Roman plebeian, or a Tuscan pauper, prince, or pope.
Cassoulet is a bean dish from southern France, where austerity is not considered next to godliness. If you can tell such things from what people eat, for Toulousians, pork, goose, and duck, all slow-cooked in fat, occupy that station.
Traditional cassoulet contains all three, plus copious quantities of fat, pork skin, and a great quantity of beans. If they were lingering, any vestigial associations between bean meals and deprivation should be erased by the very existence of cassoulet. To make an authentic one, follow any of a million good recipes. They’re involved but worth the trouble.
Or make a simpler, utterly satisfying version by cooking a mixture of finely chopped onion, carrot, and celery, called mirepoix, in olive oil, browning a small, garlicky fresh sausage per person, spooning beans and mirepoix into a baking dish big enough to fit them happily, and nestling the sausages among the beans. Add bean broth to come up just halfway and put it in a 300-degree oven.
It takes about one hour for the sausages to cook through at low heat, which gives them time to get tender and for the beans to sip up some of their juices. Take the dish out when it’s bubbly and the sausages are cooked, scatter the top heavily with toasted breadcrumbs, then put it under the broiler for a few minutes, until the top is crisp and brown.
There are similar dishes, made of mostly beans with some meat, in every bean-eating cuisine in the world. They range from franks and beans to black-eyed peas and ham, from chili to the majestic Brazilian feijoada. The principle of all is the same and the principle is good.
Best Food Writing 2012 Page 10