Red Beans and Rice

As tradition built it

Red Beans and Rice

Most strongly identified with New Orleans

Ingredients

• 1 lb (1 package) dried red kidney beans
• 1 ham hock smoked ham bone
• 1, diced onion
• 4 cloves, minced garlic

Method

1. Simmer dried red kidney beans for hours with a smoked ham bone, onion and garlic.
2. Traditionally eaten on Mondays.

Notes

This chapter states the popular explanation for that timing, that Monday was historically washday, so a pot could go on early and simmer untended while the household did the wash, honestly: it is extremely widely repeated but rests here overwhelmingly on a rice and bean brand's own marketing copy rather than a Louisiana academic, oral history, or period newspaper source, and belongs among this chapter's deliberately unasserted claims rather than the settled record.

What is better supported is the dish's layered origin: slow-cooking dried beans traces to West African culinary tradition, carried by enslaved cooks who also brought rice cultivation expertise; dried beans were already part of local Native American diets; European sausage-making and the trinity were folded in later.

What a modern chef changes

A sous vide ham hock and a concentrated bean powder

Method

1. Cook the ham hock sous vide at a low, sustained temperature until fully tender, well beyond what a stovetop simmer can achieve without breaking the meat down entirely, then shred it back into the pot only at the end.
2. Dehydrate a portion of the beans' own cooking liquor, reduced first, into a concentrated bean powder in a spice grinder, stirred back into the finished pot for a deeper, more savoury base without thinning the dish with further liquid.
3. Finish with a proper andouille, smoked at home over pecan as described above, rather than a commercial substitute.