Legumes grow on you as sustainable options that meat eaters can relish
If you’re looking for an alternative to fish for meatless entrées during Lent — or for that matter, all year round — how about building some meals around beans?
Crescent Dragonwagon has been evangelizing about bean cuisine for 40 years, dating back to The Bean Book, published in 1972, when she was just 18. Her new book, Bean by Bean: A Cookbook, illustrates how the perception of beans
has changed in the ensuing years, and how the number of readily available varieties has exploded.
“It went from a food of low social standing to being as it should be — a darling of people who love food,” Dragonwagon said in a phone interview from her home in Vermont. “That also goes together with the whole issue of sustainability: Beans and the legume family are the only plants that enrich the soil instead of sucking nitrogen from it.” Although she’s The Passionate Vegetarian ( the title
of another of her books, one that won her the James Beard Award), Dragonwagon isn’t a dogmatic vegetarian. Small icons at the beginning of each recipe in Bean by Bean indicate if they’re vegan, vegetarian, gluten- free — or “meatist,” denoting those recipes that include meat.
One method she uses to develop recipes means that many carnivores won’t miss the meat, even when a dish contains none. “One of the things I do as a food writer is to take a classic recipe made with meat, look at it a whole lot and tinker with it
according to my taste,” Dragonwagon said.
Try to buy dried beans at a store that has good turnover. “The older they get, the more difficulty there is in getting them creamy and tender,” she said. “If they’re too old, they never do get right and end up just breaking into shards.”
There are many ways to minimize beans’ famous “magical” side effects. You know, their notorious “toot.”
“If you don’t treat them right, they’ll maintain too many oligosaccharides, which are indigestible sugars,” Dragonwagon said. “I used
to say to cook them in the water you soak them in, but that’s not a good practice. The more water you soak them in — and the more you change the water — the fewer oligosaccharides, because they’re soluble.”
She noted that cooking beans with sugar intensifies the problem. Smaller beans and legumes, such as lentils, have few oligosaccharides.