Red Beans and Rice

As tradition built it

Red Beans and Rice

Serves 6. About 1 hour 40 minutes.

Ingredients

The beans

• 450g red kidney beans
• 1.9 litres water
• 1 onion, chopped

The meat

• 60ml vegetable oil
• 450g smoked ham, cubed
• 450g smoked sausage, in 1cm rounds
• 480ml water

To finish

• 1 tbsp garlic, minced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 tbsp black pepper
• 2 tbsp parsley, chopped
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 2 tbsp salt

To serve

• to serve rice

Method

1. Wash and pick over the beans. Put them in a large pot with the water and onion and bring to the boil.
2. Lower the heat and let them boil gently an hour, until soft.
3. Stir well, mashing some of the beans against the side of the pot, and lower the heat to a simmer.
4. Heat the oil in a frying pan over a medium heat and fry the ham and sausage 5 minutes. Tip them into the beans.
5. Pour the 480ml of water into the frying pan, scrape it, and add it to the beans.
6. Add the garlic, bay, pepper, parsley, thyme and salt and simmer over a low heat 30 minutes, until creamy. Serve over rice.

Notes

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, is extremely widely repeated but rests 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 the claims deliberately not asserted below.

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.

The recipe is Dooky Chase's, the Chase family's restaurant in Tremé, as published by Poppy Tooker. Chuck Taggart, of The Gumbo Pages, boils the beans hard an hour, adds the trinity, a ham hock or pickle meat, andouille and Creole seasoning, and simmers 2 to 3 hours more, mashing a cup or two of beans if it needs creaming. Camellia's Royal Street red beans go in a slow cooker on low for 8 hours.

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.