If there’s already meat on the table, or you can go without, skip the sausages and ladle beans an inch or two deep in a small ceramic roasting pan and turn them into a rustic, herby French bean gratin. Cook mirepoix as above and mix it into the beans. Bake the gratin in the oven until it begins to bubble. Mix a big handful of any combination of chopped parsley, rosemary, and safe into toasted breadcrumbs, top the gratin thickly, and let it cook until the top is quite brown.
The world of bean soups is populous. Its population is for the most part exemplary. If you’d like to make the most straightforward one, put more broth than beans in a pot and heat it up. For the second most straightforward one, purée the mixture with a little olive oil and a squeeze of lemon.
Minestrone is much more than a bean soup; it is the complete expression of the bean’s generosity, its raison d’être. Minestrone underlines all sensible cooking practices. Like the other great Tuscan soup, ribollita, minestrone is a beacon. If you have the ingredients to make either one of those soups, two of which are beans and their broth, it means you’re cooking steadily, buying good ingredients, and saving the parts of them you don’t cook immediately to cook later.
Minestrone is a precisely seasonal soup: it should reflect the season inside and outside your kitchen at all times. The beans you have cooked will always be at its center, but the rest will change throughout the year. In the winter, it will be chock-full of beans and pasta and thick enough to stand a spoon in. In spring, you will leave out the dark greens and include English peas and new onions; in summer, include the first slim green beans and basil, and little zucchini and ripe tomatoes, cut into cubes.
Minestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear or that number plus one.
Minestrone
1 cup diced onion, carrot, celery, leek, fennel
3 cloves garlic, sliced
½ cup olive oil
a small pinch of chile flakes
the end of a piece of cured meat or hard salami, diced
1 cup any combination parsley, rhyme, marjoram, basil leaves
2 to 3 cups roughly chopped any combination kale, collard greens, Swiss chard, spinach, mustard greens, dandelion greens, broccoli raab, escarole, cabbage (cooked or raw), any stems and leaves, ribs, and cores, cooked or raw
½ cup whole tomatoes, well chopped, or drained canned tomatoes
optional: ½ to 1 cup chopped root vegetables (if they are there and need to be cooked, or cooked and need to be eaten)
6 cups cooked beans
a Parmesan rind
8 cups any combination bean broth, stock, and liquid from cans of tomatoes
1 cup small pasta such as orecchiette, little tubes, or small penne
pesto, olive tapenade, fresh ricotta, or parsley for garnish
Cook the onion, carrot, celery, leek, fennel, and garlic in the olive oil until tender in a big pot. Add the chile flakes and any cured meat. Stir to combine. Add the herbs, greens, tomatoes, root vegetables, beans, and cheese rind, crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot. Add liquid to cover. Simmer for 45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone. Just before you eat the soup, cook the pasta in a pot of salted, boiling water, only enough for the soup you’re planning to eat that week, and add it to the week’s soup. If you freeze minestrone, cook new pasta whenever you eat the minestrone you’ve frozen.
Garnish with pesto or olive tapenade, or a big dollop of fresh ricotta, or simply parsley.
I once lived with a Tuscan in a house in San Francisco. I would cook a pot of beans weekly, and our bean meals followed a regular pattern. The cooked beans would sit in their broth for a half hour, contenting themselves with their last swallows of olive oil and herbs. When my Tuscan decided their time was up, he would stand ceremoniously, clear his throat, slice bread, open wine, and put olive oil on the table.
Then we would eat just beans and bread, and we would drink wine. I would do it all happily, he intently, glowing with genetically imprinted joy at his great fortune to be sitting there, eating beans, beans, beans.
There are a good number of bean-loving Americans who agree that cooked beans need no further fussing, and eat beans, on their own, as whole meals, as Tuscans do. In New Mexico, big pots of beans are cooked studded with pork and served for dinner. They’re called borrachos and eaten plain and hot with an accompanying stack of warm corn tortillas and beer. In Texas, the same beans, cooked the same way, are called frijoles and are eaten plain and hot with plenty of corn tortillas and beer. In the South, you can still get bowls of black-eyed peas or crowder peas accompanied by chopped scallions and watermelon pickles and pepper vinegar to eat with sliced white bread and beer.
Tuscans may treat dried beans with reverence, but it is a fresh bean they worship. When you know the taste of a fresh bean, you taste in dried ones the invisible mark all true loves bear: a memory of what it was we first fell in love with. Fall in love with a fresh bean, and you will stay in love with a dried one.
Fresh beans are in season in the summer, and come in as many shapes and colors as you can imagine. To shell fresh beans, practice a technique a friend calls “the twist and tickle”: twist a bean’s ends, one in each direction, and then, once its seam opens, tickle its beans into a bowl. This won’t work for fava beans. Their pods’ insides are sticky, and if you tickle them, they tickle back.
I usually use up my bean broth in minestrone or a bowl of pasta, or warm it up and make some odd, delicious thing of stale bread and whatever else is around, and probably cook an egg on it in the end. But I’ve been served plain bean broth twice, and been inspired to serve it myself several times.
The first time it was served to me was at a convent in Oaxaca, Mexico. The broth was the first course of a meal so pure and simple, the air seemed to thin as we ate. The soup was smooth and golden and tasted of grass. After it there were five tiny, glossy meatballs, on a pool of serene, dark amber tomato sauce. It was a simple meal, and it was calming.
The second time was in a weathered dining room in Turin, Italy. The broth was ladled out of a ceramic jug in which beans had cooked in the fireplace. The beans themselves were served separately with torn kerchiefs of fresh pasta, but the beanless soup was hot and each spoonful told the story of the beans’ slow bubbling amid herbs and garlic.
If you decide to serve bean broth, I have only the advice of a guest to whom I served it once. He thanked me for the meal after saying good evening, and suggested that the next time I might serve it hot. If you serve bean broth as a soup, do remember what I forgot and was too proud to rectify during dinner. If you are ladling it from anywhere other than an earthenware jug in a fireplace, the broth will have cooled as it sat and needs to be ladled into its own pot and heated up again before being served.
The writer Waverley Root did a thorough survey of Italian food, top to bottom, in his book The Food of Italy. He was deeply enamored of the noble Tuscan and insisted that the Tuscan obsession with frugality was nothing but “finesse.”
I cannot associate the word finesse with bean cookery. It doesn’t take finesse, but dried beans, good olive oil, a big pot, and time to do it well, and it takes only common sense to appreciate.
But there is great dignity in allowing oneself to keep clear about what is good, and it is what I think of when I hear the term “good taste.”Whether things were ever simpler than they are now, or better if they were, we can’t know. We do know that people have always found ways to eat and live well, whether on boiling water or bread or beans, and that some of our best eating hasn’t been our most foreign or expensive or elaborate, but quite plain and quite familiar. And knowing that is probably the best way to cook, and certainly the best way to live.
STILL LIFE WITH MAYONNAISE
By Greg Atkinson
From At the Kitchen Table
Though chef-writer Greg Atkinson earned his stars in high-end restaurant kitchens, both in Europe and in the Seattle area, his meditative essays on food an
d cooking are less about dazzling technique than about the quiet, honest rhythms of home cooking.
“When she picked up her lunch the bag felt very light. She reached inside and there was only crumpled paper. They had taken her tomato sandwich.”
—LOUISE FITZHUGH, FROM Harriet the Spy
Since I am both a chef and a writer, I am sometimes compelled to contemplate what cooking and writing have in common. What draws me to both pursuits is the simple joy I find in making something, and I have often said that baking a cake or writing a story satisfies the same impulse. I believe that this creative impulse is a basic human need. We all like to make things. And since I am not particularly good with power tools, I don’t make houses.
But among creative outlets, cooking and writing are unique in that both endeavors produce something that ultimately becomes a part of whoever partakes in them. If I cook a meal and someone eats it, and if everything proceeds as it should, then something in that food will become a part of that person. If I read something and internalize that dialogue, then the words on the page will be incorporated into my own thoughts. Ideas expressed on the page will be reformulated in my mind into thoughts of my own.
If I write a recipe and you make it, then we are sharing both the words and the dish that results from them. Of course, you’ll change the recipe. Of course, you’ll hear the words differently in your head than I would in mine, but a connection is made nevertheless, and that connection is what writing recipes is all about.
When she was compiling the recipes that would eventually become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child was living in France with her husband, Paul, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency that would eventually become the CIA. So it’s not surprising that she maintained strict security about her recipes.
“Perhaps it was my old OSS training kicking in, or just my natural protectiveness,” wrote Julia in her memoir, My Life in France. “But,” she wrote in a letter to her sister, “the form we think is new, and certainly some of our explanations, such as that on our beloved mayonnaise, are personal discoveries.” And so she sandwiched each recipe between pink sheets of paper on which she wrote “Confidential . . . to be kept under lock and key and never mentioned.”
Since I learned to make mayonnaise at a very early age, I never thought of the technique as particularly secret. My mother and her seven siblings all learned it from their mother, and they in turn taught it to any members of my generation willing to learn. In our family, dishes like potato salad and Waldorf salad just had to be made with homemade mayonnaise. But some people feel just as strongly about certain brands of store-bought mayonnaise.
The novelist Tom Robbins is quite devoted to Best Foods–brand mayonnaise. “A lot of people in my hometown are loyal to Duke’s,” he says, “but I like Best Foods, which is the same thing as Hellmann’s in the South.” Robbins hails from Blowing Rock, North Carolina, and Duke’s is made in Greenville, South Carolina. Hellmann’s, which originated in New York City, was purchased by California-based Best Foods in 1932, and the two brands utilize the same formula and market it in similar packaging on their respective coasts.
In his 2003 novel, Villa Incognito, Robbins waxes poetic about mayonnaise. “Yellow as summer sunlight,” he writes, “soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher’s rant, falsely innocent as a magician’s handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again.” The rave prompted many of his fans to start sending Robbins samples of their favorite brands of mayonnaise.
“There are some surprisingly good Mexican brands,” says Robbins, “and the Japanese make extraordinary mayonnaise. I think I have about twenty-three brands in my refrigerator right now.”
When Tom’s wife, Alexa, invited my wife, Betsy, and me up to their place in La Conner for a private mayonnaise tasting, we hit the road with a few jars and bottles of our favorite brands. I also had, secreted away in a canvas shopping bag, a wire whisk, a deep mixing bowl, a fresh egg, a bottle of organic canola oil, some white balsamic vinegar, and a bottle of good Dijon mustard. It occurred to me that Tom and Alexa might like to learn how to make their own mayonnaise, and I wanted to see how the homemade stuff stood up in a taste test with the commercial brands, especially Robbins’ beloved Best Foods.
But our evaluation of mayonnaises at Chez Robbins involved more than just the condiment itself. Mayonnaise is just one of the essential components of Robbins’ favorite food, the tomato sandwich, a culinary delight he celebrated in his book of essays, Wild Ducks Flying Backward. In addition to various musings and critiques, the collection of stories and poems includes a piece called “Till Lunch Do Us Part,” in which Robbins answers the age-old question, “What would you have for your last meal?” with an eloquent treatise on the tomato sandwich and its essential components, soft white bread and Best Foods mayonnaise. “But the mayonnaise would have to be the right mayo,” Robbins reminds us. “The bread would have to be the correct bread. I don’t want to leave the world on an inferior tomato sandwich.”
So along with the various jars, tubes, and squeeze bottles of mayonnaise set out for our consideration, Alexa had acquired a soft and wonderful commercial white bread and several perfectly ripe red tomatoes. Then I pulled out my bag of tricks and went to work. But when I set about making a batch of homemade mayonnaise so that we could compare it to the store-bought stuff, Robbins did not appear to be interested. In fact, he seemed to deliberately avoid getting too close.
“I was occasionally watching you out of the corner of my eye,” said Robbins later, “because I did find it interesting. But I didn’t want to see exactly how it’s made because I kind of like the idea of it being a mystery. I have been eating mayo for sixty years, and until ten years ago, I didn’t even know what the ingredients are. I preferred to think of it as some kind of substance dug out of an underground cave in the French Alps.
“Socrates said, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ but Oedipus Rex and I are not so sure. I like the mystery. I think Oedipus might have had a long and happy marriage with his mother if he hadn’t found out the truth.
“I had a 1969 Mercury Montego, and in two hundred thousand miles, the head was never off the engine. I attribute that to the fact that I never once looked under the hood. I thought there was a ball of mystic light that kept the motor running.
“Beneath that silliness is a propensity for mystery. Every great work of art, whether it’s a painting or a film, has an element of mystery. Mayonnaise is not a work of art, but it is the food of the gods; it is ambrosia.
“I have been quoted as saying that I don’t know how to write a novel,” he said, “and that was construed as a confession of incompetence. But that’s not what I was saying. I’m saying I don’t have a formula; I don’t have a recipe for a novel.” Rather, for Robbins, the creative process is something of a mystery. “I used to cook quite a bit, too,” he said. “But I didn’t use recipes. When I cooked, I cooked from vibration.”
I like the idea of this well enough, and even though I write recipes for a living, I almost always cook without them, feeling my way from one step to the next. First this happens, then that happens. While the onions soften, I’m cutting the celery, and on a back burner, the rice is simmering away. But eventually, my left brain kicks in and I start to codify things because I want to share them. How much olive oil did I swirl into the pan? Was that a medium onion or a large one? Was it chopped or sliced? I like the geometric proof-like formula of a recipe, and I feel that if the precision of writing it down doesn’t get in the way of the thing, it can be like an incantation, a magic formula for transforming a bunch of ingredients into something completely unlike its component parts. Mayonnaise is, after all, nothing like eggs and oil.
Making a recipe is not unlike making a sandwich. There is a formula, and when it is followed, real transformation occurs. That i
s magical.
Homemade Mayonnaise
Homemade mayonnaise is not only easy to make, it’s also an exercise in practical magic. The end result is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Many recipes, including some of mine, call for a food processor. But for a small batch of the stuff, especially someone’s first batch, hand whisking is better. It helps to have a second pair of hands; one person handles the whisk and the bowl while the other person slowly dribbles in the oil. If white balsamic vinegar is not available, use white wine vinegar with a teaspoon of sugar.
Makes about 2 cups
1 egg
1 tablespoon white balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
¾ teaspoon fine sea salt
1½ cups canola oil, preferably organic
Whisk the egg in a medium mixing bowl with the vinegar, mustard, and salt until the mixture is very smooth, almost fluffy. Whisk for at least 1 full minute before adding any oil in order to set a good foundation.
Whisk in a few drops of oil. Then, whisking all the while, build to a very slow but steady stream until all the oil is incorporated. As the sauce comes together to make a stable emulsion, the last of the oil can be added somewhat more steadily than the first few tentative dribbles.
THE FRIED CHICKEN EVANGELIST
By Lorraine Eaton
From Leite’s Culinaria
Covering the local food scene for southeast Virginia’s The Virginian-Pilot newspaper, columnist-blogger Lorraine Eaton delights in the characters and culture of Southern cooking—like Mississippi-born fried-chicken master Sydney Meers.
I was raised in the South in a home that never knew a grease-splattered stove.
Best Food Writing 2012 Page 11