Mesoamerica · Volume 07, Belize, Honduras and the Mosquito Shore

Rice and beans

Belize (Kriol); also Garifuna, as resanbinsi

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 1 hour

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

by Belize (Kriol); also Garifuna, as resanbinsi

The single most useful source found for this chapter is not a cookbook or a heritage body but a peer-reviewed anthropology paper: Richard Wilk's "'Real Belizean Food': Building Local Identity in the Transnational Caribbean" (American Anthropologist, 1999), the product of fieldwork in Belize going back to 1973. Wilk's argument, stated in his own words, is the reason this chapter refuses to write "the cuisine of Belize and Honduras" as one smooth thing: "Belizean restaurants appeared first in New York, then Los Angeles; Belizean cuisine is a concept invented almost entirely outside of Belize. Under a national label it submerges ethnic distinctions between what Belizeans call 'Spanish' food (tamales, garnachas, chirmole), Garifuna dishes like cassava bread and fish stew (sere), and Creole foods like boil-up and rice-and-beans." He quotes, verbatim, what was likely the first restaurant to brand itself explicitly "Belizean," a radio advertisement placed by a Belize-born couple returning after twenty years in the United States: "Treat yourself to a Belizean Feast. Authentic Belizean dishes, Garnachas, Tamales, Rice and Beans, Stew Chicken, Fried Chicken." Every dish on that list was already being cooked, separately, by its own ethnic tradition, all over Belize. What was new was the label, and the label was invented in a diaspora restaurant, not at home. Wilk's own 1990 door-to-door survey of 389 Belizeans found only eight dishes, out of twenty one rated, that respondents clearly agreed were "Belizean Creole food." Even Belizeans do not agree on a single bounded national cuisine. This chapter follows Wilk's own distinction rather than inventing a tidier one: Garifuna dishes are Garifuna, Kriol dishes are Kriol, and where the two genuinely meet, as with cassava's crossing between them, this chapter says so rather than blurring it.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Rice and beans

Belize News Post; serves 6 · 1 hour

Ingredients

1 x 227g tin, or 2 cups home-stewed dried red kidney beans (or a smaller red bean, cultivar unnamed in sources)
1 tin (2 cups) coconut milk
2 cups rice
1 medium, minced onion, chopped
5 cloves, minced garlic
1 tablespoon, dried thyme

Method

Boil the dried beans first.
Combine the beans and their cooking liquid with the coconut milk, rice, chopped onion, garlic and thyme.
Simmer together until the rice absorbs the coconut-tinted liquid.

Notes

No in-tradition, Belizean-published source giving exact measured quantities could be found for this chapter, only the mechanism and sequence, which is well and consistently corroborated; any precise ratio should be treated as a working starting point rather than settled tradition.

What a modern chef changes

Separately cooked beans, a toasted grain

Method

Cook the beans separately sous vide with their own aromatics until precisely tender, rather than in the open pot where overcooking or undercooking is easy to misjudge, then combine the beans, their liquid and the coconut milk with the rice only at the final simmering stage.
Toast the rice briefly and dry in a pan before it meets any liquid, a small addition with no stated traditional precedent, for a firmer, more distinct grain once the whole pot is finished, rather than the softer, more porridge-like result an untoasted grain gives in a rich, fatty liquid.
Finish with a few drops of coconut oil, pressed and clarified through a chinois, stirred through just before serving for a glossier, more aromatic finish than the cooking liquid alone provides.

Open in the atlas: cook mode, scaling and tick off lists