Most beans are lowly, of course, but it seems to me that the pinto, the lentil, and the black bean are the lowliest of them all, and all the more charming because of it. Sometimes I picture these three beans holding hands and chiming together, “We’re lowly! We’re of the earth! We’re beans for the people!” And sometimes, when I envision this trio, the black-eyed pea waddles into view and says, “Whaddabout me, guys?” And the pinto, the lentil, and the black bean say, “Hiya, black-eyed pea! Get in here! We didn’t forget you!” Then they all sing some kind of bean song.
Lowliness, in my book, is a virtue, and therefore by telling you about my dream of the lowly beans I am simply revealing to you my favorite beans. And of all the beans I have loved in my lifetime—and there have been many—no bean stands above the black bean. The black bean reigns supreme. The black bean has the key to my heart. The black bean and me go way back.
Now, I should be clear here what I’m actually talking about. I’m not talking about dried black beans, glorious as they are. I mean, they’re beautiful and cheap, and every time I see the big bin of them in the bulk aisle of my food co-op, I have to resist the urge to plunge my arms in up to my elbows. If I could, I would like to swim in a sea of dried black beans. But no, it’s not dried black beans that I’m in love with. I’m in love with the canned ones. True, some people will say that using canned beans is cheating—like buying canned applesauce instead of making your own—and I understand that point of view. But to get dried black beans tender, in my experience, you have to boil them for approximately six days. You know what I say to that? Give me the can opener. Because inside that lovely little can o’ beans are not only beans that are already cooked, but beans that are sitting in a bunch of their own gravy. Bingo! That’s the good stuff.
I first met black beans in college. It was the early nineties, and things were looking up for black beans. In those days, I was flirting a lot with both vegetarianism and vegetarians, and black beans and rice was basically the standard meal that vegetarians on campus were making. My friend Sarah, who lived in a co-op dorm where the students did the cooking (just think of the amount of beans they went through there), showed me the very clever and unbeatable trick of stirring shredded cheese into the hot rice just before it was served with the beans. I still use this trick to this day, even though it does make a bit of a mess for whoever washes the rice pot. The mess is worth it, though.
By my senior year of college, I was cooking for myself, and black beans and rice was my favorite meal because it was fast, easy, cheap, and satisfying. I owned exactly one cookbook at that time, The Moosewood Cookbook, and it had a lot of credibility with me because it featured a knockout recipe called Brazilian Black Bean Soup.
I also relied on black beans throughout graduate school. I think that it was then that I started sometimes serving the beans with cornbread instead of rice—pouring the hot beans over the cornbread. This way of using cornbread was clearly something that was part of my Missouri heritage. It also, I realized, made for a fantastically complete dinner because cornbread, when topped with apple butter or just butter and honey, was a superb dessert.
Those were the early years of my black bean love. To be honest, a lot of the memories have faded somewhat, and many are gone completely. But all of the memories—the clear ones, the muddled ones, and the lost ones—are good. It was the courtship phase of my relationship with black beans. It was a golden time. It will dwell in my heart forever.
In the late nineties, at the alarming age of twenty-five, I returned to teach English at my alma mater. When I got the job, I was living in Missouri, and the logistics of looking for an apartment in upstate New York were awkward. Just when it seemed as if I would have to fly out there just to find an apartment, the office of faculty housing called me and told me that they had one opening. But it was a very small apartment, they explained, and it shared some kind of common entrance hallway with another apartment. Sounded fine to me, and the price—about two hundred a month—was so insanely low I had to take it. Plus, it was just across the street from campus.
My dad and I loaded his pickup truck and my car with my furniture and books and trekked east in late August. When we entered the new apartment, we liked the first room—a square little room that was about the size of a junior’s dorm room—and we wondered what the second room would be like. We opened the door to the second room only to discover that it wasn’t a second room. It was a closet. So the next day Dad headed home to Missouri with my sofa and a few other things still in the back of the pickup. They hadn’t fit in the apartment.
That first semester of teaching, it quickly became clear that I didn’t fit into the system. A few years ago, I’d been a student here, and happily so. But now I was too old and too square to socialize with the students. (Plus, it was kinda against the rules.) Likewise, I was too young and not boring enough to socialize with the professors. In addition, walking around campus was like walking through a landscape filled with ghosts, because though the place was the same—there was the window of my freshman room, there was my old girlfriend’s apartment, there was the chair in the library I had fallen asleep in so many times—the people were different. All my friends were gone, excepting a couple of professors.
So, outside of the classroom I spent my time alone. I would scurry home before dark. My apartment was cozy, that’s for sure. My mom had made curtains for the big bank of windows, and I would close the curtains, and turn on the radio to an AM station that played songs from fifty years earlier, and then I would start cooking dinner. I had no television. Cooking was my entertainment.
The other thing about the apartment was that it was bisected by a long entry hall that led to another apartment. On one side of the hall was my bedroom, with its own door, of course. On the other side of the hallway were my galley kitchen and bathroom. There was no door between the kitchen and hallway, and so whenever I was cooking dinner, I was standing just a few feet from the hallway, and invariably Mary Lou—a short librarian more than twice my age, with an unfortunate librarian haircut and a deeply held conviction that synthetic fabrics were evil—would come in, smell my dinner in progress, comment on how great it smelled, then shuffle into her apartment. She would then shuffle back out to walk her dog, shuffle back in a few minutes later, basically repeat how good my dinner smelled, and then disappear into her apartment for the evening. In other words, my cooking was a public affair. Many days, these interactions with Mary Lou about the aromas of my cooking were the only words anyone spoke to me all day.
What does a person cook for himself when dining alone every day? Lots of soup. Pasta. At least a few times a month I would make something new out of The Moosewood Cookbook, something nice. A treat. But truth be told, the best treat of all was a pot of hot black beans and fresh cornbread.
Maybe my human college friends weren’t here anymore, but I’d also met black beans in college, and they were still with me. My friends, the beans. As for cornbread, well, cornbread and I went even farther back—to the edge of memory, to family meals, to my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. So here, on my plate, I had a small assemblage of friends who knew me well. That was enough, for those two years I lived there. Beans and me and cornbread. That was just enough.
I remember once I was working late in my office, grading papers or maybe just playing Snood on the computer. It was in the autumn, I think, and I printed something out on the network and then went into the English Department office to retrieve the printout and there was my pal Dean, who’d been one of my professors just four years ago, but who was now my colleague. We chatted briefly and then he said why didn’t we go and grab some dinner together?
It was a perfectly reasonable request. I liked Dean, and he had always been kind to me. (The summer between my junior and senior years of college he let me store several boxes of my belongings in his garage, for example.) But the problem was that I had retreated so far into myself—shielding myself from the ghosts and memories of this place—that I had become reliant upon the comfort of rituals and plans. I had already decided that I was going to have black beans and cornbread for dinner, and I had already picked out the can of beans—hours ago—and put it on my kitchen counter as a reminder. And I now found myself wanting, more than anything, to go home to enjoy my simple meal by myself. I stammered something about how I already had plans for dinner—even awkwardly mentioned the can of beans I had already picked out—and, bless him, Dean saw that he had hit upon a nerve and he told me that it was no problem at all and that we would have dinner another time. I agreed.
What does an introvert do when he’s left alone? He stays alone.
At the end of my second year, I told the department I didn’t want to teach a third year, and I started thinking of where I could move and be a writer full time. I got a house-sitting gig for the summer. It was a huge rambling farmhouse at the edge of campus, a full hundred and fifty years old, and it contained just me and a cat named Lydia. I was excited about not teaching anymore, and about getting away from this place, and about summer, so I drew up a long list of things to do—picking berries, hiking, visiting a certain used bookstore that was in a barn, etc.—and then I promptly spent most of the summer doing nothing but sitting around the house, taking daily bike rides out on the college’s farm—the only local landscape that reminded me of the Midwest—and cooking dinner for myself every night.
In the middle of the summer, my friend Laura visited me. She and I had been best friends in college, and for two years of graduate school we were a couple, and now we were just friends again. We spent part of our visit walking around campus and revisiting our haunts and talking about our friends. And that was good, being with someone who remembered the same ghosts that I did, someone who reminded me that they weren’t ghosts at all, of course, but real people who had simply scattered—mostly to Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Then, later in the day, back at my house, I asked Laura what she wanted me to cook for dinner. She had lived with me for two years, after all, and knew the kinds of things I was best at cooking. And she said, without a moment’s hesitation, “Beans and cornbread.”
Black Beans for One
Is it soup or just beans? Neither and both, I suppose. Serve it hot, over split cornbread or with rice. For extra goodness, stir shredded cheese into the hot rice before serving.
MAKES TWO SERVINGS (tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
115-ounce can black beans
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
In a medium saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat, then add the onion and garlic. Cook them, stirring frequently, until they’ve started to brown. Add the beans and their liquid, stir, and lower the heat.
Simmer the beans, partially covered, stirring occasionally, until the liquid thickens a bit and is smooth—about 20 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. At this point, the beans can be served immediately or removed from the heat, covered, and kept warm for up to 15 minutes.