Sometimes a pot of beans is the most monotonous thing I can imagine. More often it’s big and boundless and full of possibilities. And occasionally, though not very often, it’s just food. I have been making slight iterations of Good Beans on Toast every week lately and revelations abound. This practice is not repetition. Because, as Gertrude Stein said, “there is no such thing as repetition.” It is insistence.
I am noticing, in each return to these beans— there is something else there too, within the task of the cooking itself.
The cooking is happening and there is joy / creativity / thought in that action and the resulting fruits, but it is not the act— it is the act within the act. It is eroticism. Yes, making beans is erotic. No, not in that way, you sick puppy, erotic as Audre Lorde describes it: “For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.”
Too often cooking is reduced to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we make beans or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. (Audre Lorde)
So I return again, insistent on the erotic nature of the returning itself — to the kitchen, the stove, the pot, the beans, the old wooden spoon, to myself.
Revisited Good Beans on Toast
Ingredients:
Bag of Large White Lima Beans (also known by their more erotic name— butter beans)
8 cloves garlic
1 medium white onion
4 sprigs thyme
1/3 cup olive oil
Loaf of good bread (sourdough batard, Pain au Levain, etc.)
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1-2 Lemons
Bunch of fresh dill
2 tablespoons capers
Salt & Pepper to taste
Good Beans on Toast:
Get a big, heavy, preferably cast iron enamel pot and put a glug or two of olive oil in the bottom (enough to cover).
Heat should be on medium, or whatever your stove needs to heat without getting high enough to burn the oil.
Wait for the oil to get hot and crack some black pepper into the oil (they should sizzle a bit and that’s how you know it’s hot enough to move on)
Add roughly chopped onion
Add 6 cloves smashed garlic
Let simmer in oil for 1-2 minutes
Rinse your Lima Beans and add to the pot
Add water to pot, enough to cover about 3 inches over the beans
Add sprigs of thyme
Several pinches of salt (diamond crystal kosher salt is a favorite) the water should be good and salty early on
Bring to a rolling boil for about 10 minutes (uncovered) and then drop down to just an easy simmer (lid on, but askew)
Beans will cook for about 1.5-2 hours - if you have to stop the cooking process for kids or dogs or whatever takes you away, put a lid on beans and let sit. They might just finish cooking on their own here, or at least, continue softening
If needed add more salt and hot water as you go - the broth should be salty but not over-salted
About an hour in, keep trying the beans, you’ll reach that point where they seem almost done - but some are still a little too hard - keep cooking
Wait
Find that magic moment before the skins start to break and they’re uniformly meltinyourmouth soft
Turn off heat
Make a cheaters aioli- microplane or finely chop raw garlic (1-3 cloves), juice of one lemon and 1/2 cup of mayonnaise (I use vegenaise because, in the words of @blackforager, “I’m a filthy vegan.”)-- whisk it together until you have the consistency of salad dressing. Add more lemon or mayonnaise and some cracked black pepper accordingly, and let stand
Add rinsed, chopped capers to your aioli
Cut bread into thick slices and toast
Strain off beans from the broth and for god’s sake don’t get rid of the broth, it’s liquid gold - use for rice or soup or pasta!
Put a little of your aioli and capers on toast
Add scoop of strained beans to cover
Drizzle with more aioli
Top with lots of fresh dill
And Maldon or another big flaked salt, black pepper and lemon zest to finish
Light a candle and make your arrangements because you might die it’s so good.
making this today