the bean chronicles: prologue
Beans are a good pandemic food. I was first reminded of this when listening to Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway’s podcast, Home Cooking; one of the best things to come out of 2020. It brought a smile to my face every time I listened. I used to hoard the episodes for rougher days to cheer myself up. Their inaugural episode, Bean There Done That (yes, this delightful podcast is full of good - and very bad - puns, and that only makes me love it more), offers ideas on what do with your beans. Since dried and canned beans can keep for years on end, they were (and are) a great food to stock up on.
I grew up in a North Indian vegetarian household; lentils and beans were nearly a daily staple in our home. The whistle of the pressure cooker was a familiar sound in my childhood; it was often accompanied by my mother calling from some other part of the house for someone to turn the burner off. The pressure cookers of my childhood were a pot and a lid with interlocking handles; nothing else. My mother would track the whistles from it, knowing by the number when a dish was done. Beans and lentils fell out of my rotation when I moved out, as did homemade Indian food, but in the last few years, I have purchased dried lentils when my mother is in town. She will show me how she cooks them, I will take notes, and then I will find them languishing in the back of the pantry months or years later. She even bought me an Indian pressure cooker, a miniature of hers, but I was both terrified of it exploding and too distracted to count the whistles. I also couldn’t unlock the lid without dipping it into the daal inside. When I got an Instant Pot, for the express purpose of expanding my Indian cooking repertoire, I felt a renewed burst of determination to use the dried lentils, but that faded away, too.
In January 2020, I was getting drinks with a coworker and she told me about the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. I confess, I am just as susceptible as the next person to exclusive clubs - especially when they involve food. She had only been able to join, she said, after signing up for the wait list and being referred by a friend. There was always a wait list, apparently. I had heard of Rancho Gordo, but I knew nothing about this bean club. I was still in the ‘I buy canned beans’ phase of my life, despite growing up in a household where dried beans reigned supreme. I didn’t have the forethought, nor did I meal plan enough, to soak dried beans in advance of cooking, so I always defaulted to canned. I was intrigued by the club, though. It was a quarterly shipment of heirloom beans. The idea of a cooking challenge, not unlike a CSA box, but with a much higher threshold on perishability, appealed to me.
After this conversation with my coworker, who kindly referred me for a membership, the bean club fell to the back of my mind. The first two months of the year were busy, and well, then the world just stopped. I didn’t give it much thought. But in late October, an email arrived from Rancho Gordo: I was off the wait list.
I was unreasonably excited. What better time to embark on a new cooking adventure? With winter fast approaching, a big bowl of beans sounded very appealing, and I might finally use my Instant Pot as often as it deserved. The quarterly shipment arrived just as I was leaving to spend two quarantined weeks with my family. I decided to save the reveal (the unboxing, as the Instagram influencers would say) for when I got back. A little present to open upon my return.
I told friends and family about the beans. During COVID, a lot of my conversations revolved around what was for dinner; it was the only thing that was always changing, even when nothing else was. Everyone seemed to be experimenting in their kitchens more than usual. Text chains with friends were full of links to recipes and pictures of successful dinners. The beans were a project that could help break up the monotony of being homebound. I put a book on hold at the library, Joe Yonan’s Cool Beans. I had read about it earlier that year, a book dedicated to beans and vegan cooking. It would be the perfect accompaniment for this adventure. I downloaded the Home Cooking episode about beans again, where Samin, a self-proclaimed “bean dork”, calls bean cooking liquid “liquid gold.” I spent minutes between meetings looking up bean recipes on my favorite sites.
My first shipment included one pound each of six different types of beans, and a bonus pound of crimson popping corn. The variety was amazing; I hadn’t heard of half of the varieties I received. They were all beautiful. The package came with a branded flyer, not unlike the ones at Trader Joe’s, with suggested recipes for each of the beans. I pored over the flyer, and then dug into Cool Beans, to decide what adventures I was going to embark on. Cool Beans is nearly like a bean dictionary, albeit with recipes, and the Rancho Gordo Bean Club is even mentioned in the introduction! Along with the recipes, there are suggestions for what types of beans can be substituted for others, conversions from dried to cooked weights, primers on how to cook them on the stove and in an electric pressure cooker, and even a page on how to keep “the music” from playing (a common concern among the people I spoke to about this project). My sister, knowing about this new obsession, kindly sent me Cool Beans as a birthday gift, so I could relinquish my library copy. She had done her own research and ordered it before she knew I had a copy from the library. I had everything I needed to get started.
