Red Beans and Mondays
When I was small I thought Red Kidney Beans were poisonous. I’m not sure if this was something everyone thought, or whether it in fact is something that has a grain of truth to it, but anyway, I avoided them. I also went through a period where I was sure eating spaghetti would cause me to choke and die, so avoided it in-lieu of penne for the duration — what a fool I was.
I only ate Red Beans & Rice once when I was in New Orleans — it was a side dish at the famous shabby-chic restauraunt Jacques-Imo’s, right on the end of the St Charles Streetcar line, but it was delicious. It was rich and unctuous and comforting and deep and smoky. If you’re going to build a culture on dishes, then you need something sturdy like this, I think, something that people will gravitate to in times of trouble. Something that reminds them of home.
New Orleans is full of dishes like this. Po Boys, oversized and overstuffed sandwiches; Muffalettas, hollowed out loaves of bread filled with delicious meats and pickles; Gumbos, Jambalayas, Beignets. Food that is low-level-pretentious and high-level-delicious. Traditionally, Red Beans and Rice is a dish for Mondays — it’s something that you can leave to cook for a while, without having to tend to too much, and can make use of leftovers. Ropey veg, meat from the previous day, old bones. This is a tradition that’s kept up to this day in the city, and it’s a good one.
I don’t know why I think about New Orleans as often as I do. I was there for a week, cumulatively, but there’s just something intangible and brilliant about it — it’s a city that values all my favourite things above all else: music, food, good liquor. The people are brilliant, the streets are incredible. I miss it, as dumb as that sounds to say, I really do. Anyway, yesterday was Monday, and I made Red Beans & Rice.
You’ll need:
Onions
Celery
Peppers
Garlic
Kidney Beans
Smoked Sausage (we’ll come to this later)
Stock
Cayenne Pepper
Tabasco
Bay Leaves
Rice
Parsley
Lemon
Ok so, where French cooking has a mirepoix, Cajun cooking has the trinity — essentially the same, except the trinity replaces the carrot with bell peppers. What you want is a base, a good bottom line of flavour — onions, celery, peppers, diced up roughly (I left the peppers a bit bigger so you get big bites in the final thing, up to you entirely). You know the drill, fry them in oil until it looks like they’re softening and becoming one beautiful, holy mass. I threw in a few cloves of garlic here too, some dried chilli, a big teaspoon of cayenne, and three bay leaves. Bay leaves are great eh? You don’t know what they do but you know they’re important.
Now comes the smoked sausage. Ideally, you want Andouille Sausage, which looks like this:
You do not want Andouilette Sausage, which looks like this:
However, Andouille Sausage is fucking hard to find in the UK. The closest I came was locating a dude on twitter who claimed to make his own, but the conversation stilted soon after. Andouille is a smoked pork sausage with cajun spices and wine, firm in texture. I’ve tried this recipe with chorizo (it’s alright, but becomes something else entirely, not what you want), saucisson (pretty good, not smoky though) and a few different kinds of Polish smoked sausage, and I think the Polish ones just about win out. Muck around though, why not, essentially you want the sausage to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of seasoning — if you find some really shit-hot fancy saucisson, it’d probably be great. If you do manage to find Andouille and don’t use it to make Red Beans & Rice then, well, you’re a mug. Anyway, chop your smoked sausage up into fairly big bits and throw into the pot, stir around, try and get a little colour.
(Note: I’m not using measurements here because I feel like this is one of those ‘judge by eye’ recipes. Play it by ear)
Now come the beans. Until someone tells me that the £1.20 Red Kidney Beans are demonstrably better than the 30p ones, I’m sticking with the 30p ones. Three tins, drained and washed, go in now, and get a stir, before you throw in a chicken stock pot and enough water to cover. Bit of salt, a pretty generous portion of tabasco (I used about a third of a small bottle which, at first, tasted like too much, but it mellows out quite significantly). Lid on, leave it simmering. Stir it whenever you fancy looking and tasting it. If you think it’s getting a bit dry, pour some more water in.
So far, so very-very-easy, and that’s pretty much it. There’s only one bit that’s quite neat and makes you think you’re being cheffy. When you’re nearly there, take out say, half a cup of beans — it doesn’t matter if you scoop up some vegetables here, but try to avoid the sausages. What will probably happen is the beans will sink to the bottom, so go digging for them. Anyway, mash them up to a paste and stir back in. This has the dual-effect of thickening your sauce, and making it a bit creamier. Stir again, taste.
For the rice, just make rice, you know how to make rice. Stir parsley and spring onions and a squeeze of lemon into it when it’s steamed and delicious, and serve a big portion of beans. If you have big chunks of bread then slice them up, why not. Honestly, this is the best thing to do on Monday nights when it’s cold, and it’s getting cold. It’s so delicious, it’s really cheap, it’s easy, and it’s impossible not to like. If that wasn’t enough, it’s also the bedrock of maybe the greatest city in the world — I have no idea how this recipe would go down in NOLA, but it certainly reminded me enough of it.
