The Supplication of Bean Stewing

And upcoming appearances in London!

The beautiful British edition of Feast on Your Life comes out next week!!!! Please come say Hi on February 11 at the incredible Honey and Co. in Lamb’s Conduit. Tickets here!!!

I’ll post other events as they near. I’d love to meet you all!! Now, onto this week’s letter.

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Dear Tamar:

I’m making minestrone. I don’t see any point in draining and rinsing canned beans. Can you please weigh in? Thanks.

-Bean Stewing

Dear Bean Stewing,

I once had a therapy session in San Francisco that, for some reason, had an ephemeral epiphanic effect. My therapist had said something prosaic, like: “No one is watching.” And for the two proceeding hours, I believed it. I’ve spent my whole life scared of being upside down. But during those two hours, I went to a yoga class and, unburdened by self-consciousness, did a bouncy handstand. My fellow students—whom I’d always imagined whispering that I was a doddering clown—seemed gentle and friendly. Even the mercurial wind, which normally agitated me, felt full of promise. For those hours, the world was mine.

As I mentioned, the effect was temporary. By the afternoon’s end, I was re-stuck in the familiar mucilage of mitigated experience fraught with second guesses. But I knew what was possible. On a tennis court last year, flanked on both sides by the kind of overly intense players—grown-up hobbyists convinced they’re at Wimbledon—that normally paralyze me, I was able to imagine myself invisible for the duration of my match. Do I even need to report that I played the best tennis of my life? (I have no illusions about Wimbledon. My best still looks like a semi-coordinated twelve year-old picking up a racket for the first time.)

Memory of respite from a shadowy sense of being constantly evaluated sustains me. I practice whispering to myself: “You’re invisible,” whenever self consciousness threatens to rob me of perspective. Sometimes, it even works.

Have you guessed by now what my self-soothing strategy has to do with your canned beans? You’d be forgiven for not seeing the connection. I’ll come out with it: If you don’t see the point in draining and rinsing your canned beans, don’t. If, on the other hand, it seems like draining and rinsing your canned beans is the only tolerable first step toward using them, indulge your conviction. No one is watching. You’re invisible. Do whatever you want.

If you’re using the beans in soup—as you are—and you reason that you’re going to be adding more liquid and more salt to the pot while here you are, about to pour liquid and salt that could go into the pot down the drain, then you must not ignore your own reasoning. If you taste the liquid and dislike it, relieve yourself of any guilt and dump the can into a colander, run water over the beans, and be rid of the tinned taste forever—or until the next can of beans.

I’ve always directed cooks to drain and rinse canned beans. I don’t like taste of the liquid in the cans. Thousands of people have discovered aquafaba—the liquid in cans of chickpeas. I know this, but I still don’t like it or use it. I moved to Spain in August. And after decades of draining and rinsing any bean I didn’t cook at home, I altered my course. I now pour purchased beans directly into a pot or pan of warm oil and lightly sizzling garlic. This is not because I’ve changed but because my beans have. Cooked beans—even lentils—are sold in jars in Spain. The taste to which I’ve long objected seems to be a result of canned beans’ container, rather than intrinsic to them. Absent the light tinniness I’m accustomed to, purchased bean liquid is entirely tolerable, to me. So I use it.

If I were making hummus from purchased chickpeas, I would drain them and keep the liquid for adding to thin the puree. If I were making some sort of bean salsa or salad, for which I didn’t want anything bathing, but for each ingredient to be fresh and discrete, I would also drain, and then reserve or toss the liquid, depending on the day and my further cooking plans. Or, that’s what I think I would do. But I reserve the right to make up my own mind. As should you.

Dear cook, I don’t know why I have confidence and a lack of self consciousness in the kitchen, while remaining disabled by doubt and self consciousness in the rest of my life. I only know that I aim to add more and more activities to the first category and leave the latter, in the end, quite empty. For you, who will soon be stewing beans in minestrone’s fragrant mix of olive oil, rosemary, carrot, fennel, potato, broth, tomatoes, and kale, I wish for purchased beans to firmly enter the realm over which you believe that no one is watching and no one cares. Then, when you stew beans, you will at least not stew over them.