Romancing the Bean: Essentials for Creating Vegetarian Bean Dishes - Softcover

Saltzman, Joel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915811480 ISBN 13: 9780915811489

Publisher: HJ Kramer, 1993

Synopsis

In this companion book to Amazing Grains, Joanne Saltzman applies her unique approach to a wide variety of dried beans. Saltzman explores the fundamentals of dried-bean cooking, explains seasonings, soaking, different types of preparation, each bean's unique attributes and taste, and provides more than sixty kitchen-tested recipes that showcase them in a variety of dishes. Also included are recipes for tofu and tempeh, two processed forms of soybeans.

About this title

About the Author

Joanne Saltzman is the founder/director of the School of Natural Cookery based in Boulder, Colorado. She has been involved with cooking and specifically with teaching natural food cooking for more than 25 years, and she has created a system for understanding the creative process of cooking whole foods. Joanne has been a culinary consultant to health food markets, and corporations seeking recipes to promote whole grain and other natural food products.

From the Back Cover

The United States Department of Agriculture has recently replaced the Four Food Groups with a Food Pyramid that recommends a largely vegetarian diet for optimal health. Yet even now, beans - the main source of vegetable protein - are still a neglected and misunderstood food in the repertoire of many cooks.

In Romancing the Bean, Joanne Saltzman teaches us about cooking and serving beans as a mouth-watering source of protein. She begins with instructions on the fundamentals of dried bean cooking, explaining seasonings, pre treatments such as soaking, and the different types of preparation (pressure-cooking, steeping, deep-frying, sprouting, baking, boiling, slow-cooking, marinating, and others.) She then describes each bean's unique attributes and taste and provides recipes that showcase beans in a variety of dishes from the simple and rustic to the gourmet.

But that's only the beginning! In addition, Romancing the Bean offers a discussion of how each dish was created, what particular ingredient or technique was favored, and how each recipe can be altered depending on the seasonal availability of ingredients or on what happens to be in the cooks pantry. Developed by Joanne at her School of Natural Cookery in Boulder, Colorado, this unique approach emphasizes the creative process in cooking and can help free you from dependence on recipes forever.

Praise for Joanne Saltzman's Amazing Grains

"Documented here is a process of transmission, whereby the teacher doesnt give you impersonal formulas, but a way of seeing, feeling, and understanding the ingredients and techniques. Joanne is a cook, a teacher, a healer, and above all an artist, and all of these disciplines contribute to the book." (World of Cookbooks)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Romance in cooking is hardly new. Sharing love through food is a primal experience that can be rekindled at any time. Yes, even with beans. Beans have been laughed at, considered low-class food (poor man's meat), and been the brunt of numerous digestion jokes. Yet I imagine if beans could talk, their point of view would sound like this:

And Queen Bean said to the little seedlings, "Why are we not honored at the table of fast-food dwellers? Why is not our glory seen in the kingdom of their plates?" She proceeded to sway her audience with smooth words, thick with intensity, and speckled with humor. "Our integrity is unmatched; our form noble, elliptical, reflecting shapes of the universe, sometimes matching the shape of human organs. We build and rebuild the very fiber of a cell into a grand muscle. There is not a drop of excess useless waste from our kind. Each part of our life - our stalk, our flowers, and our seed - is given to humanity. Our sweet taste and velvet touch receive the company of seasonings may they be hot, sweet, or aromatic. We do not judge. We receive, with open heart, flavors of the world. But beware we're not the jester. Mistreat us and there could be suffering. Ignore the essence of our being and we will fight back, causing internal agony. But care for us as you would your loved ones and we give our bounty: nourishment for the body and peace for the spirit. For when you take us as food, no animal will suffer."

Beans Through History

Beans are among the oldest foods cultivated by humanity. We read in Genesis that Esau was a cunning hunter, but when he was hungry he sold his birthright to his brother Jacob for bread and pottage of lentils. Older cultures have counted heavily on bean cuisine, especially in combination with grain. Oriental combinations use the soybean with barley and rice; traditional American people ate a wide variety of colorful beans with colorful corn; India brings dal and rice together; Mediterraneans eat chick-peas with wheat in the form of couscous, bulgur, pasta, and pita bread; and Ethiopian culture serves injera bread with crushed peas and lentils. It is only fairly recently and in the industrialized west that beans have been used mainly in combination with meat, as a vegetable rather than a basic source of protein. Perhaps North America will soon acknowledge the power of this simple food.

Travel and trade have disguised the original sources in many cases, but modern archaeology has traced beans as part of the diet of humanity to the prehistoric era, back at least 15,000 years ago. As early as 2,000 B.C., history records that beans were rotated with grain to benefit the soil, replenishing an element necessary to all plant growth. This practice of using bean plants as green manure is still important today throughout the world.

Beans also took part in superstition and ritual. The Greeks fostered a belief that beans held the souls of dead mean, and to walk across a bean field was sacrilege. Both the Greeks and Romans used beans as a symbol when casting votes for political office and for trial verdicts; a white bean signified a yes vote or deemed a man innocent, and black beans voted him out of office or found him guilty (the source of today's term blackballing).

Southwest American Zuni initiated young men about twelve years old into the kiva (a spiritual meeting place, usually round and underground) by having them bring a bowl of boiled beans in the color that represented the kiva they were entering. This ritual encouraged the cultivation of many varieties of beans, what modern science calls maintaining genetic diversity. Hopi priests break ritual fasts by eating beans, and some people use a Mexican custom of placing three beans on their temples to relieve a headache. Beans found in tombs high in the South American Andes mountains reveal their position in a pre-Inca civilization. The beans were stored in clay posts decorated with designs of men and women holding an ear of corn in one hand and a bean stalk in the other. This traditional relationship of beans and corn demonstrates a marriage of foods supporting each other nutritional and organically as they grow entwined from the earth to the sky, the gentle bean wrapped around the study cornstalk.

Categories of Beans

Today there are over 1,000 different varieties of beans. How you classify them may have something to do with you. A gardener looks at botanical names, growing habits (pole or bush varieties), and sometimes climate. A historian looks to the origins and journeys of beans, contrasting Mediterranean broad beans and lentils with Asian soybeans and common beans from the Americas. Culinary artists regard shape, color, size, and flavor. But to me, the most important factor in classifying beans is the cooking time that they require. As new (old) beans appear, and they will, it is important to know how to make them digestible. Knowing their cooking requirements could be as simple as classifying them into short-, medium-, or long-cooking beans.

Short-cooking beans, such as lentils, mung beans, and azuki beans, are usually small and can have a larger carbohydrate component than medium- or long-cooking beans. They take less time than medium or long-cooking beans to reach a satisfying smoothness in the first-stage cooking method (see page 16). Often they are split, the category known as dal in Indian cooking, which includes red lentils or split peas.

Medium-cooking beans are the most common kind of bean. Black turtle, kidney, pinto, and navy are just a few. When you encounter a new bean, test it as a medium-cooking bean. If it is still hard after the first-stage method, you will know that it really belongs in the long-cooking category.

Long-cooking beans such as garbanzo and soybean, require long soaking, whereas medium-cooking beans may or may not need to be soaked, depending on the strength of the stomachs that will be eating them and the first-stage cooking method that is followed.

Beans in the Body

From a nutritional point of view, beans provide mostly protein with some complex carbohydrates. Protein, the nutrient that maintains the body, building and rebuilding most tissue, is the fundamental material of all plants and animals, and dietary protein is essential to survival. Although there is protein in grain, beans are the most important source of protein in the plant world.

Only recently, beginning with the studies of William C. Rose in the 1940s and 1950s, has the chemistry of protein been researched. Proteins are strings of amino acids, of which there are twenty-some varieties; half of them are constructed by the body from the elements already in the body, but the rest must come from the diet. Meat, eggs, and milk products offer enough amino acid combinations for each to be a complete protein. Beans and grains are both high in protein, but neither one offers complete protein by itself; put them together, however, and the combinations of essential amino acids is complete.

Unfortunately, protein consumption has become a bit of an obsession, obvious in plates of food that measure 75 percent meat, 20 percent starch, and 5 per cent vegetables. Quantity of protein has somehow gotten mixed up with quality. Fortunately, vegetable protein performs more efficiently in the body than animal protein, and it usually comes with much less fat attached. It also offers equal, if not more opportunity for culinary pleasure.

Edition details

• Publisher: HJ Kramer
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0915811480
• ISBN 13: 9780915811489
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184