“My mother often served us a supper of kidney bean soup or a pot of baked beans on a winter night,” Edna Lewis writes in her 1976 classic, “The Taste of Country Cooking,” adding that the rest of the menu included cornbread studded with pork cracklings, salsify bathed in butter and cream, and a jelly roll filled with the fruit preserves of summer.
The beans weren’t actually baked, but that’s beside the point. “Stews and thick soups cooked leisurely in the side of the hearth and were enjoyed before a lively fire that sent up loud reports of snaps and crackles as if it knew we were enjoying our meal after a day of plowing through the snow to feed the stock and gather in the evening wood,” she wrote.
As you know if you’ve had the pleasure of reading it, Lewis’s book uses recipes to document her upbringing in Freetown, Va., a farming community settled by formerly enslaved people. And the first time I read it, I marveled at the lyrical — and yet unfussy — way she describes food.
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End of carouselI’m Joe, the food and dining editor of The Post and the author of this weekly column on plant-based cooking. I’ve been a vegetarian since 2012, and now my diet is mostly vegan, with a little flexibility built in (mostly for work purposes). I’ve written several cookbooks, including “Cool Beans,” and my next will publish in fall 2024.
Sometimes I develop my own recipes for this column, and sometimes I spotlight the great work of other cooks and authors. And I love hearing from readers: Feel free to email me at joe.yonan@washpost.com.
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When I started cooking from it, I realized that the same description can be applied to the dishes themselves. These are tight recipes, by which I mean there are no extraneous ingredients. Everything is there for a purpose, and when they all do their job, what results are dishes that taste almost elemental in their deep, satisfying flavors. There’s also a universality to her cooking that transcends region, even though her food is deeply rooted in the South. This is cooking that’s tied to the seasons, which means tied to the rhythms of farming, and it can speak to anyone with memories — or perhaps fantasies — of a close-to-the-land existence.
Her recipe for baked beans stood out to me. Besides my long-standing obsession with legumes, it reminded me that slow-cooking them isn’t the exclusive provenance of Yankees, as popular (and great) as traditional New England treatments can be. Having something that can simmer away on the stovetop or in the oven while other work gets done is crucial to the success of any cook whose day is otherwise occupied. In Freetown, they were plowing fields and collecting wood. In New Orleans, women put on red beans to serve with rice while they spent Mondays doing laundry. At my sister’s homestead in Maine, they’ll soon be tapping trees and boiling down maple syrup while beans lounge in the outdoor bread oven.
Generally speaking, though, we’ve sped things up since Edna Lewis’s time in Freetown, and probably not all for the better, of course. On the one hand, I’m glad I don’t need to gather wood to operate my electric induction stove; on the other, what do we use all our saved time for? Sitting in front of a crackling fire with family, telling stories, has got to beat sending TikToks to my husband as he does the same for me — from the other end of the couch.
But here we are. Some days, mostly on weekends, when I want the flavor of a long-cooked bean dish, I’ll use a clay pot meant for just that, and I bake at 250 or 300 degrees for a few hours. Most of the time, though, I turn to my trusty Instant Pot, which has gotten those Cajun-style red beans down to a tidy hour. Can you make baked beans without, um, baking? If Edna can, so can I, and so can you.
For Edna’s dish, I use white beans, such as navy or cannellini or Great Northern, and they cook a lot faster than red kidneys, so I set the multicooker to a mere 30 minutes. I keep the rest of her ingredients in place, with the notable exception of her “1/2 pound streaky lean salt pork,” because, well, this is a vegetarian cooking column. For that, I sub in some liquid aminos (such as Bragg’s), along with a touch of smoked paprika, for almost meaty umami. The recipe’s essential brilliance — the use of an onion to evoke a subtle sweetness without any sugar, maple syrup or other sweetener — remains intact.
I knew I was onto something when my husband kept talking about them in almost reverential tones days after I made these beans for him. They’re good enough to eat with some bread and a salad, but I couldn’t resist pairing them with grilled-cheese sandwiches, the way you would go if you were making tomato soup instead. As he went back to the pot time and time again, he said, “Tell that Edna Lewis thank you.”
I have, and I will, for brilliant beans and so much more.