Bean and Legume

Hoppin’ John is the must-have dish for southerners on New Year’s Day; it’s widely believed that if you eat black-eyed peas on that day, you’ll have good luck all year. This a great dish for a crowd and can definitely be prepared ahead of time. Since the black-eyed peas need to soak overnight, start this a day in advance. Serve with my variation on Mr. Beard’s Cream Biscuits (page 54).

Beet greens, with their dark green leaves and pungent, earthy flavor, are especially tasty with white beans. A nice alternative to beet greens is mustard greens, which are a little spicier.Other options are turnip greens and broccoli rabe. Start this dish a day ahead because the beans need to soak overnight.

Parmesan and beans sounds an unlikely coupling but I recommend it. Pecorino, a young one, is a possibility here too, or one of the hard sheep’s cheeses British cheese makers are getting so good at.

A marrow for supper will generally coincide with the leaves turning on the trees, the first early morning mists, new school uniform. Their bulk and their bargain-basement price ensure that they will make a cheap supper. For this, we love them. This filling—earthy, sloppy, and much nicer than ground meat—is good for pumpkin too.

Green lentils and bacon has long been a salad worth making. I will occasionally fold in some shards of crisp, olive-oil-drenched toasted ciabatta or lots of whole parsley leaves. A couple of years ago I started moving the whole thing up a notch by putting the lentils against a few pieces of exquisite Spanish ham and adding a certain smokiness with wide slivers of zucchini, their edges blackened from the grill. This has become a late-summer lunch I can’t get enough of.

A good soup for a spring day, bright green and not too filling.

I ate this rather soothing way with lettuce twice last week, once for lunch, accompanied by a piece of salmon, the second time for supper, with nothing but a hunk of soft farmhouse bread, the sort with a dusting of white flour on top. Light, juicy, and clean tasting.

Sweet squashes marry well with the earthy flavor of beans and lentils. This is apparent in the dhal and pumpkin soup in The Kitchen Diaries and here in a more complex main dish that offers waves of chile heat with mild citrus and the dusty “old as time itself” taste of ground turmeric. Dried (which is the only way most of us know them) chickpeas are the stars of the world’s bean dishes, used to fill bellies everywhere from India to Egypt. Their character—knobbly, chewy, and virtually indestructible in the pot—makes them invaluable in slow-cooked dishes where you need to retain some texture. Fresh chickpeas are bright emerald green and have an invigorating citrus note to them that is completely missing in the dried version. I saw some for the first time this year. I have long wanted to put lemongrass with chickpeas, partly to lift their spirits but also to return some of their lemony freshness to them (I use more lemon juice in my hummus than most as well). This recipe, which just happens to be suitable for vegans, does just that. Like many of those slow, bean-based dishes, it often tastes better the next day, when all the ingredients have had a chance to get acquainted.

The smell you get from slicing freshly picked runner beans and the warm, herbal notes attached to the stalk of a tomato are, to my mind, the very essence of summer. Put those scents together and you have a recipe that is pure pleasure to make. A dish that could only mean midsummer—something to eat with cold salmon, a slice of crab tart, or a plate of grilled sardines.

As much as I like big flavors, I sometimes want something more gentle, a little genteel even. French beans lend themselves to such cooking.

Anyone who has shelled a bag of peas will know how good they are raw. Far too little is made of their scrunchy sweetness, and I put forward the pod-fresh raw pea as an idea to throw into salads of pale yellow butterhead lettuce, cracked wheat, or dishes of cooked fava beans. They work in their uncooked state only when very young and small. Old peas are mealy and sour. One rainy lunchtime in June, I put them into a simple salad of Peter Rabbit lettuce, crisply cooked smoked bacon, and hand-torn ciabatta. The result—restrained, refreshing, and somehow quintessentially English.

It’s mid-June and I have returned home with four lamb steaks. It’s the sort of thing I buy when my mind is elsewhere. I think I was after a “nothing-special” lunch of ease and straightforwardness, yet once the steaks and their fine frame of white fat had been brushed with olive oil and the leaves and flowers of thyme, and were sizzling on the blackened garden grill, I realized I had an extraordinary treat on my hands. Instead of a mound of petits pois at the lamb’s side, I blitzed the peas to a smooth purée with mint and melted butter.