GREAT WAYS WITH BEANS
Diana Henry transforms a storecupboard staple into three hearty new dishes
I’m never without tins of beans: haricot, cannellini, flageolet, borlotti – there are always a couple of cans of each in the cupboard. Cannellini are brilliant for that old summer standby, tossed with tinned tuna and red onions, though I also make a wintry version of this salad with canned borlotti beans, garlic, chopped anchovies, capers and loads of parsley (and chopped celery leaves if I have them). Beans are good, too, for throwing into stews towards the end of cooking time if you want to make the dish go further, not that they’re just there as a filler. Their bland creaminess is gorgeous in its own right. Their skins break down easily and their interiors melt in your mouth. This muted softness is particularly good against ingredients that have plenty of oomph – such as anchovies, capers, bacon and chorizo – as, that way, you get a constant interplay of extremes (one of the best things, to my mind, about a good dish) as you eat.
What I hope I can persuade you of, though, is to cook your own beans, not to always rely on cans. They’re a great storecupboard standby, but they’re not beans at their best. We are capable of coaxing flavour out of cheap cuts of meat but not quite as keen to put the work into pulses. When I was testing the lamb on page 84, I made another big pot just of beans, mixing them with pancetta, lots of olive oil, softish tomatoes that were lying around in the fridge, diced carrots and celery, some tomato purée, whole cloves of garlic, and rosemary from the bush outside the kitchen door. I started them on the hob and finished them off slowly in the oven, throwing some breadcrumbs in towards the end, then stirring them in once they’d browned. The crumbs acted as a thickener, and the resulting pot was so soft and sloppy and savoury that we ate them by the bowlful for the next few days. Beans from cans – because they’re already cooked – don’t take on the flavours of the ingredients you combine them with. But dried beans, which you soak and cook from scratch, are like sponges. They become imbued with all the ingredients around them – fat from pork, lamb or olive oil, herbs, spices, the sweet juices of tomatoes (slowly cooking alongside the beans until their flavour is intensified), and onions and herbs.
The other thing that happens is that the beans create a thick liquor – starchy, soothing cooking juices that cling to them. You do get this liquid in cans, but it never tastes as good. The flavour of the juices you create at home are the direct result of the other ingredients you put in the pot. These cooked beans will make gorgeous gratins. If you’ve never layered beans up in a gratin dish with other vegetables, topped them with cream and baked them, you’re missing out. Keep your cans. But do get some dried beans into your cupboard as well.