Love this compilation of recipes, background,
information and anecdotes written in Dragonwagon's familiar voice: honest,
sincere, and passionate, with gentle doses of her humor. I'll spend hours with
this book that includes such a great variety - from the Senate's Navy Bean Soup
to one similar to my grandmother's Pasta e Fagioli - covering scores of bean
types and a wide range of styles (Greek, Thai, American, French, Indian, etc.)
Peas and lentils included, too. Tonight I'm tossing together Sugar Snap Pea,
Orange and Spinach Salad. Tomorrow Black Bean Soup. Whether you're new or old
to bean-knowledge, I think you'll find something enticing here - if you like
beans, that is. Kudos to Crescent Dragonwagon (great name!) for this yum
volume.
- lakeside, Amazon.com
If I were a bean, I would feel lucky to be planted
in Crescent's garden, and perhaps even luckier when, at just the right moment,
I was picked and taken into her kitchen to be handled with care, appreciation,
and love and ultimately transformed into an appetizing and sustaining
meal--after all, legumes have the most concentrated amount of plant-based
protein around. Or perhaps I will be left to dry in my pod, then shucked, and
stored in the pantry until one winter's day when I end up in a simmering pot of
chili. Then again, once dried, I might be plopped in the ground the following
spring, to start the cycle all over again. This is the story of the bean told
in Crescent's warm, inviting, and conversational style, a conversation in which
you the reader are addressed directly with such sweet terms of endearment as
"baby" and "angel." (Crescent, by the way, developed her
conversational style long before our current age of blogging, in which a
direct, conversational style is now commonplace.)
This book is a makeover of the author's first
cookbook, The Bean Book, published in 1972. And yet it is so much more than
that. It represents thirty years of digging deep into beans, their history,
their cultural meaning, their literary references, and deeper yet into the
endless ways to prepare them in the kitchen and enjoy them at the table. In
Bean by Bean, you will learn a slew of practical bean cooking and eating tips:
such as, how to check if your bowl of dried beans has in fact soaked long
enough (you split one open; it should be the same color all the way through);
how to "de-gas" your beans (yes, Crescent deals with the issue of
flatulence head-on, which, it has been proven, generally becomes less and less
of a problem if you incrementally eat beans more and more); and how to get the
complete dietary protein your body needs from beans (simply pair them with
grains).
On a very fundamental level, you will learn the
three basic classifications of beans: fresh, or "green," beans, in
which the entire bean is eaten, pod and all; dried; and those lesser-known and
too rare (especially outside the South) in-between bean known as shell beans or
shellies. Like their more mature, dried counterparts, the shell beans are
shelled, or shucked, and the pod discarded, but the beans may be prepared
similarly to fresh beans (they take a little longer to cook than fresh, but not
much longer). After discovering the pleasure of eating shell beans this past
summer while visiting a friend in Alabama, I appreciate the author's passion
for them. Crescent's tip for preparing fresh and shell beans together in the
same pot is something I'm dying to try, once they are in season again.
In the meantime, a green curry of tofu and green
vegetables awaits, as does Crescent's recipe for the irresistible Gotcha-Hotcha
Sweet-Smoky Cocktail Peanuts, a reminder, by their inclusion in Bean by Bean,
that peanuts are, after all, a legume.
