This is Recipe No. 1 in stretch cooking. When you want a little to go a long way, it can’t get more fundamental, filling, or satisfying, than beans. Or blackeyed peas, which is a slightly different recipe but spiritually generic with beans.
The beans are dried pintos. Southerners now in their 50s and 60s – and beyond – will remember that their parents called them “red beans.” Talk about red beans today, and the young people will probably think you are talking about kidney beans, which are about as different from red beans as a tire is from a tornado.
In the really hard times, beans would be the appetizer, the salad, the main course, and dessert. I have never lived or cooked in the really hard times, as my grandmother and stretch cooking champion Susie Grant did, so on my table the beans are a side dish 95 percent of the time. They go with anything, even fish, if the fish is fried. And they freeze well. If you cook two pounds of pinto beans, I guarantee you are going to freeze some.
So let’s cook two pounds of beans. At the supermarket, they come in two- and one-pound bags, so it’s easy to halve the recipe. Pour the beans onto a tabletop a few handfuls at a time and pick through them for rocks, or anything else non-bean, like small dried buds of mud. Sweep the beans into a colander as you work. Then rinse the beans and pour them into a large mixing bowl or pot and soak them in water – about two inches deeper than the beans – overnight. Or you can soak them from early morning into the afternoon.
Chop three-quarters of a pound of leanish bacon, place in a large cooking pot, and barely cover with water. Place over medium-high heat. Chop fine a large onion. When the water has cooked off and the bacon is just starting to sizzle (you don’t want the bacon to get crisp), add the onion to the pot. (If you want vegetarian, skip the bacon and add the onion to a couple of tablespoons of olive or cooking oil in the pot.) Leaving the heat medium-high, add two teaspoons each of pepper and salt, and stir the bacon and onion a minute or two until the onion is soft and a brown glaze is forming on the bottom of the pot. This glaze is flavor gold. Then, if you have some leftover coffee, add a scant cup to the pot, stirring and scraping to “de-glaze” the bottom of the pot. If no coffee, then pour in some water from the soaking beans to de-glaze.
Dump in the beans and add water, if needed, to just reach the surface of the beans. Stir the bacon and onions into the beans, turn the heat to medium-low and cover the pot. After 15 minutes check the pot and adjust the heat so the beans have a nice simmer. Stir them occasionally and with a spoon sample the pot liquor after about 45 minutes and add sprinkles of salt and pepper if necessary. Around 90 minutes, when the beans are starting to look done, get a couple of beans on the spoon and blow on them. If the skin cracks, they are done, or close to it. Chew the beans, and if they are soft, they are ready. If they are a bit firm, check again in 15 minutes.
When the beans are done, you can mash a cup of them in a bowl and add back to the pot to thicken the pot liquor.
Many cooks swear by a meaty hambone in the beans, but that is a different kind of beans, great eating, of course, but not as flexible as a side dish. You wouldn’t serve hambone beans with barbecue, for example. Plus you have to have a hambone, which ordinarily happens only after a holiday. I can’t think of a better stretch-cooking afterlife for leftover ham than in a pot of beans. We’ll talk about that on another day.
Dried blackeyed peas are cooked the exact same way as above, only they don’t take near as long to get done, about 45 minutes. At New Year’s, when the Southern tradition is to eat them for luck, you can find fresh blackeyes even in California. But you don’t lose a thing with the dried, if you ask me. And, if you’re doing a batch for visiting vegetarians, just leave out the bacon. I have to stop now. I am getting weak with hunger. Next Thursday, look for a recipe for Smothered Steak.
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