Fresh Beans

Katrina, tireless advocate for her patients that she is, received recently an enormous sack of white potatoes as a “thank you” from a patient. In the sack, resting on top of the potatoes was a plastic bag full of long, cream-colored bean pods and so the gift was that much sweeter. The next night, one of our good Kisoroan friends came for dinner and brought with her a bag of more beans as a gift. We were suddenly rich.

The next day, home from hospital work, I decided to try to make food from these bursting bags of plant seeds. Our friend, Charity, had shown me the method of shelling. You hold the pod with both hands and use your thumbs to split along the seam, then run one thumb down the open pod to push out each bean into the pot in front of you.

When I sat down to the effort, I remembered a woman I saw in a village called Buzeyi, a long ride from town spread on the rising slope of Mount Muhavura. She saw in her courtyard, a tangled pile of bean vines studded with crisp, dry pods within arm’s reach. As we spoke with her husband about managing his Parkinson’s, her gaze was fixed gently on the horizon and her hands automatically took pods from the tangle and, with easy fluid motions, split and spilled the beans into a woven basket.

I tried to emulate her that afternoon as I shelled my own beans, affect her unconcerned gaze into the far-distance, and work my hands in a series of quiet, efficient movements. It takes practice, years of it no doubt, to work with a bean harvest as deftly as this woman and each bean requires a slightly different effort.

Some pods are fresher and firm with moisture. They split, in my maladroit hands, in rips and flakes. The drier ones open willingly with light pressure from your thumbs and reveal the 5 or six bean fruits inside. Each bean – I was delighted to discover pod-by-pod – was unique and colored from a prismatic palette. Large zebra-striped beans, small ones white as teeth, mottled purple ones, grey ones bruised with orange, a few dusky blue, and one perfectly golden bean. Their dark, withered pods gave no clue as to the quality of these precious stones.

To cook them, I sautéed a base of shredded carrots, onions and smashed fresh tomatoes – all from the previous day’s market. Splashes of balsamic vinegar (one of the imports we implored Katrina’s parents to bring over), stirred in with our sturdy wooden spoon, deglazed the pot of the sweet carrots’ burned caramel bits. Four pinches of homemade chili seasoning from Ben and Molly’s wedding went in and a few shakes of salt. I dumped all of this into the huge pot of shelled beans with cups and cups of water.

This simmered for most of the late-afternoon and by eight in the evening, we ate the beans over rice. The pigments had cooked out of them, but the beans were tender, and suffused with the rich, red broth they had bubbled in for hours. We ate on the porch under candle light, ate our fill without reservation. The simple market ingredients were all we had needed.