San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ode to the soulful magic of beans
A simmering pot and fresh tortillas cut through time
We’re in the eye of an exaggerated and tasteless Instagrammable food storm. Mounds of millennial pink scoops of cookie dough stacked on top of each other like gridlock traffic, created and ordered solely “for the ’gram.”
Where are the hashtags dedicated to the simple and soulful dishes? A platter of roasted chicken, a cup of consommé, a bowl of rice. Much like people believe chicken soup has magical healing powers (it does), I believe the same can be said about a pot of simple homemade beans.
But a bean is not a bean is not a bean. At least, that’s what Tara Rodríguez Besosa tells me while Besosa holds fresh and pale pink habichuelas in both hands. “Pink beans are really hard to find,” says Besosa. She is not talking about all pink beans, though; just the heirloom, Puerto Ricogrown varieties that have faded away over the years — the kind my grandmother might have grown up with on the island.
Rice and beans are life in Puerto Rico. And yet, the vast majority of the island’s beans are now imported. Which is why Besosa is working on an 8acre project called Otra Cosa in the San Salvador community of Caguas, Puerto Rico. Otra Cosa will become a seed sanctuary on the island, focusing on the propagation, collection and sharing of indigenous seeds and beans, complete with a social media . So far, Besosa — who runs the project with partner Lex Barlowe, Veronica Quiles Maldonado and Jana Green — has only found three farmers growing fresh beans in all of Puerto Rico.
My grandma, who grew later moved to California, always preferred the pink beans or red beans she grew up with. She didn’t always go the presoak route. She started her pot of beans in the morning, simmering the dry beans for hours until they were ready to be served. Most times she’d make habichuelas with a simmering collective of sofrito, tomato sauce, sazon, papas (for viscosity) and smoked meat (mostly ham hock). She decisively left out the calabaza, which is often found in Puerto Rican bean renditions.
Sometimes she’d transfer a small amount into a shallow pan, giving them a mash with some manteca to make her version of refried beans, a cooking trick she learned from her Northern California support system of mostly Mexican immigrants. Once, she gave me the task of keeping an eye on the beans while she went on her sundrenched porch and bochinched with her neighbor. Alas, I did not watch the beans. Although my body was a mere few feet from the rumbling pot, my teenage brain was elsewhere, totally enthralled by Tom and his shenanigans with Jerry.
My uncle Papo burst through the door, leaped over my legs, while shouting “The beans are burning!” I quickly jumped from the couch, and together we stared down at the pot of darkly crusted beans. The good news: We had more beans in the pot. The bad news: My grandma never entrusted me with the beans again.
I would, however, learn more about her beans as I grew older, and how the recipes tie back to my godmother, Dolores Zavala. Affectionately known as Nina Didi, she met my grandmother in the 1960s and has been my mother’s comadre for nearly 50 years.
When I walk into Nina’s 1925 bungalow in Stockton, it feels like the type of house you want to wake up in on Christmas morning. It smells like the most comfortable of used bookstores. There’s an old potbelly woodburning stove that sits in the corner of the living room; its spout can be seen from the outside at the end of the gravel driveway if you stand next to the almond tree. It billows out thick plumes of smoke that drift over the barbwire fence and into the ditches that line the road with no sidewalks.
I know Nina Didi is in her 70s, but she has no wrinkles. Her skin is as smooth as the inside of the shed bark of an American sycamore. She stopped dying her hair and now it is various shades of white, with silver in her windswept bangs. My mother and Nina affectionately talk s— to one another in a way that people don’t allow these days and I feel bad for those people because real intimacy and honesty are two things critical to genuine friendships.
Nina Didi is the last of the unconditional lovers. It’s in the way she talks, the way she cooks, it’s in the way she chooses her partners. It’s also in the way she unquestionably allowed me to collapse into her arms and weep after my nana had passed away. I take a seat on one of her overstuffed couches in the dark living room, where I have a partial view of the kitchen. The golden light from the kitchen spills into the living room and there’s a sliver of a view of Nina Didi standing at the stove.
It feels like I’m peeping through a keyhole. She’s starting her beans.
She makes beans at least once a week. She maniacally shuffles through her dim kitchen, the floor groaning under her feet, the gas range heating up the entire room. She fusses and curses everyone. Her voice raspy with a tinge of Chicana cadence bouncing off her Bauer bowls and pouring out of the doorway. She fills her pot with tap water. The beans that soaked overnight follow. She roughly slices white onions and garlic. Into the pot they go. The galley kitchen won’t hold more than one cook at a time and yet we all seem to take our turns impatiently passing the pot of bubbling beans. They’ll bubble away for hours, just the right amount of time for a visit, a coffee, a game of dominoes, possibly an unplanned nap.
Later, she makes sopa de arroz, which despite its name, is not a soup but rather what you might know as Spanish rice: a dry rice mixture simmered in chicken broth, onions, garlic and tomato sauce. Time to make tortillas. While she’s mixing together flour, warm water, scant baking powder and forming a dough, I’m asking her where she learned to make tortillas. Her reply? “My tia had a cantina down in Guadalajara.” (It’s the first time I’m hearing this story.)
She places a clear Pyrex bowl over the dough and leaves it to rest. When she returns, she pinches off a piece and cradles it in the meaty Lsection between her thumb and index finger. She places it on her Formica counter and rolls it out until thin. She lays it on the comal. The smell of char swells in the kitchen and the dough starts to form a single bubble informing us it’s time to flip. She places the hot tortilla in a kitchen towel, covers it and repeats the process. She stirs the beans and adds a heaping mound of her secret ingredients: Monterey Jack cheese and a little milk. The mound of milky white shredded cheese starts to melt and ooze into the bean water, creating elastic strands that adhere to her mixing spoon. The broth has turned thick. We line up in the warm kitchen and the frenzy of gathering and passing plates and utensils begins. We serve ourselves from the steaming pots on the stove; rice, beans and tortillas. We sit down at the aged dining room table and silently dig into our homemade tortillas and our homemade rice and beans. Home. Made. The beans are simple, only five ingredients. And yet they are buttery, creamy, salty and floral. They are meaty and melty. We’re all thinking to ourselves: This is the single best thing we’ve eaten in a long time. My nina apologizes for not having companyappropriate food in the house. She complains that the tortillas are tough (they’re not) and the beans are too simple (they’re not). And my mom will finally tell her, “Oh, will you just shut up and eat?” And it’ll make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Toward the end of my grandmother’s life, after a few bypass surgeries, the doctors banned her from eating so many things she enjoyed. Ham hocks were banned. The acidity of tomato sauce would give her heartburn. She lost interest in eating most things.
But she never turned down a simple bowl of rice and beans. Rice and beans were life. It didn’t matter if they were pinto, pink or red. We had to start making beans in the way of my Nina Didi.
And so Nina Didi’s beans became nana’s beans.
Illyanna Maisonet is a firstgeneration Puerto Rican. She sometimes writes about food, too. Twitter: @eatgordaeat Email: food@sfchronicle.com