Southern Beans Competition: Two Winners are Kidney Beans And Pinto Beans

Growing up in New Orleans we usually had red beans and rice on Monday night. This kidney bean dish is my idea of the ultimate comfort food. A steaming bowl was served in restaurants for Monday lunch, inexpensive and always good. A fast dish ladled up from a big pot brewing on the back burner in the restaurant kitchens. New Orleans, then and now, is a place to buy many verities of sausage. You could put so many different kinds of meat in the kettle from savory to mild taste… Cajun to country, with or without ham bones, and all delicious. Ham bones or ham hocks are my pork of choice. There is something that happens to pork when it stews in the spiced bean broth giving it a special flavor, color, and texture.

Type into Google the phrase, “New Orleans red beans and rice Monday night tradition” and you will get hundreds of hits. A lot of transplants like me reminiscing about their youth. A blog called Brood was one I really liked--A lovely story about ways to enjoy traditional New Orleans Red Beans and Rice. http://seaswell.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/red-beans-and-rice-sunday-dinner-6/

After living in Tennessee for 35 years I more often cook pinto beans than the red kidney beans of my childhood. My husband grew up with pinto beans so that sways my choice for cooking. Pinto beans are grown on farms all over this area. In the summer you can buy them fresh-shelled at the Farmers market and in some local grocery stores. During harvest months the Nashville Farmer’s Market have people in booths hand-shelling beans and one booth has a cool motorized mechanical bean-sheller. Pilled up in mounds right next to this noisy apparatus are stacks of smoked pork packages. Pretty good marketing strategy.

I am trying to get used to pinto beans. I have been working on this problem for three decades. Sometime I just have to use kidney beans when the nostalgia over takes my mental condition. New Orleans is to kidney beans like snow is to Alaskan native people. In south Louisiana you can buy beans of different sizes, colors, and shapes. Provides a difficult decision making a good dilemma for your grocery-shopping experience in the bean isle. We do not have this grocery-shopping problem in Nashville; there are not so many choices.

Note: A web link to one of many of the articles about native Alaskans words for snow: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, and Fairbanks.
http://www.princeton.edu/~browning/snow.html