The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
COOL BEANS
For Super Bowl or Mardi Gras festivities, there’s no better way to feed a crowd than Louisiana red beans and rice.
Vince Hayward cooks his red kidney beans all day in a slow cooker — sometimes with smoked ham hocks, sometimes with vegan sausage, always “heavy on the bay leaf.” If they aren’t creamy enough by the time he gets home from work, he smashes them with the back of a spoon.
Hayward knows from beans: He’s the fourth-generation owner of Louisiana’s venerated Camellia bean brand.
Gina Lee takes a different approach with the spicy staple of New Orleans cuisine. She treats the components individually: Red beans simmer in chicken stock. Andouille sausage and tasso ham are sauteed with aromatics in their own skillet. Jasmine rice steams in a cooker.
“I cook the three ingredients separately to save the aroma of the holy trinity,” says Lee, general manager of the Garden & Gun Club at The Battery Atlanta. She’s referring to the mirepoix of bell pepper, celery and onion known as the Cajun Holy Trinity. Born in Korea and raised in Atlanta, Lee later tended bar at New Orleans’ legendary Commander’s Palace. She gleaned the art of the bean from spying and eavesdropping on the Commander’s cooks. Along the way, she learned that red beans and rice can stir strong emotions in people. She married a man from the Big Easy, and when he gets homesick, she comforts him with his iconic hometown dish.
According to New Orleans lore, red beans and rice became a Monday night tradition centuries ago, because Monday was laundry day. While the clothes were washed and wrung by hand, a pot of beans seasoned with leftover Sunday ham could simmer for hours. In 1923, Hayward’s grandfather came up with the nifty idea of packaging red kidney beans in individual bags, thereby fueling the Monday night tradition. “We pushed ‘em hard,” Hayward says.
The bean king says there’s no correct way to create the dish his family helped popularize. “That’s one of the cool things about the dish of red beans and rice,” he says. “There’s a million variations, and none of them are wrong.”
Until recently, I’d never thought much about the dish, probably because I had never had a memorable version. That changed when I encountered Emily Shaya’s recipe last year while I was working on a profile of her husband, Alon, the Israeli-born, James Beard Award-winning New Orleans chef. Shaya wisely leaves the bean cookery to his Georgia-born wife. One Monday last winter, I realized I had the ingredients for Emily’s recipe, and after cooking the beans for about six hours — that’s three loads of clothes, if you will — I finally understood the essence of the dish.
Unlike all the chunky, chililike impostors I had dismissed in the past, Emily’s concoction was a thick, smoky gravy, rich with fat from bacon, ham hock and andouille. Ladled over her buttery, onion-flecked jasmine rice, it was magic. You can find Emily’s recipe with a mere flick of the Google; it’s been published far and wide.
For this article, Lee was kind enough to share her thoughtfully considered recipe. (I confess I added a smoked hock to the simmering beans and cooked the dish longer than she would, probably, but I could still taste the trinity!) Hayward, for his part, sent me a recipe he recently developed for a vegan kettle of beans. He’s a fan of Field Roast Mexican Chipotle sausage, made with grain. I found it at my neighborhood Publix.
If you’re putting together a Super Bowl party or a Mardi Gras feast, do like I did, and make a pot of vegan and a vat of meatbased. Fix Emily Shaya’s rice. Braise you some Slow-Cooker Collards (a first for this Southern boy — and a genius idea) and a bowl of Splattered and Smashed Potato Salad. Call all your friends. Tell one to make cornbread and another to bring a gallon of tea or a cooler of beer.
All these recipes can be made ahead of time. The red beans and rice improve if you let the flavors mingle. “ALWAYS better after sitting a day or two!” Hayward roared via email.
His family didn’t invent red beans and rice. They just made them a New Orleans staple.