I often batch cook at weekend. Often things that will freeze well and do for fast lunches during the week. Because I have to please but myself with these things, they’re often dredged from the great canon of US diner cooking. Which is why, as my appendages froze a few weekends ago, I made a pot of black bean soup.
Black bean and pea & ham are the two standard soups in the repertoire. But to assume that they are like other soups - a nice stock, thickened with something delicious, balanced with vegetables and perhaps enriched with dairy - would be a mistake.
Soups made with dried peas or beans are miraculously cheap. If you’re using ham or bacon in your diner, then fat, trimmings and even the water it was boiled in, create a by-product of ridiculously over flavoured, salty smokey fluid which can be thickened to deliciousness with an Imperial shit-ton of split peas for about 50¢. That’s not cooking; it’s economics. But pea and ham soup, lovely as it is, is merely the sum of its delicious parts.
Black bean soup is something, most definitely, else.
In making it, it’s very important that you don’t get clever. That you get yourself into the mindset of a struggling and parsimonious owner-operator in the middle of the Depression. Think Nick Papadakis in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Or, come to think of it, Mildred Pierce herself (Why do I love James M. Cain so much? Why did he so love diners?)
You start with a big, ugly onion, a big ugly carrot and three cloves of garlic. Smash the garlic and chop the veg into robust dice. Put them in a big pot with about half a mug of oil and fry them gently until the onions take colour and there’s a possibility of sticking. Pour in half a mug of red or white wine vinegar and reduce by half. Pour in the liquid from a small can of chipotles in adobo followed immediately by a pound of dried black beans, and enough water to cover them by about an inch. You’ll need a palm-sized pile of Mexican oregano then bring it to the boil and drop back to a simmer. Don’t even think about messing with it now. No bay leaves, or parsley, or anything else more fancy. Just forget about it. Walk away. Go check how Cora’s getting on with that handsome young drifter that came looking for odd jobs.
It takes a couple of hours if you picked up your beans in the same place the Mexicans buy theirs. If, like mine, yours have languished since Suez on a high shelf in an English whole food shop... it might take up to a day. But you just keep the simmer low and, every half an hour or so, you go back and give it a listless stir. If the beans show any signs of drying on the surface, pour on more water, again to a depth of about an inch.
And that’s how the magic occurs. The beans cook infinitely slowly... sometimes it feels like they’ll never give up... and then suddenly some break down. The carrots and onions provide just enough sweetness. The vinegar works as a gastrique. The chipotle juice brings cumin, smokey pepper and a really subtle tomato sourness. But it’s all almost homeopathic. The bean slurry takes on a flavour somewhere between a rich game gravy and melted dark chocolate. Totally sui generis. The texture is satin.
And it’s dark. God, it’s dark. It can suck the light out of a room. Even the carrot chunks have taken on sombre depth. Still keeping some texture, still sweet but something of the night about them.
And then there’s the salt. You mortals cannot comprehend how much salt this stuff can take on. But it’s the only condiment you need. And it’s the cheapest. (If salt terrifies you, use MSG).
But the real wonder is the unique way you’ve created something out of nothing. By letting the beans be themselves. By the simplest, cheapest interventions and the magic of time.
This size batch makes about ten single servings, but the incredible thing is that it just keeps getting thicker, so every time you serve it, you end up letting it down with more water... and it somehow never suffers.
You can swirl in some cream soured with lime if you’re terrified by brown food, but please, God, no ‘fresh torn cilantro’, no crumbled feta... nothing you could misconstrew. No those are ‘chilli fixin’s’ and that’s a whole ‘nother thing.
Just let it be what it is. Black Bean Soup. A time-forged, fully-evolved pinnacle of the grill-man’s thrift and ingenuity. BBS on the ticket.
Well that's what the house is going to smell of all day tomorrow!!!