New cousins, new beans

I'm a family history addict. I'm lucky to have been born into a family of story tellers and writers, so reading and listening to family lore my whole life made me want to know more about the various branches of my ancestry.

Genealogy is a multidisciplinary journey. First I learned about public records and archival research; then record-keeping and sourcing. When my search for ancestors moved offshore I dredged up my high school French and German and acquired some basic Latin. As the family tree grew I wanted to know why people left their homelands. What was their life like? Why did their names change? So I sought out histories of the Huguenots, Quebec, the Banat, Haiti, Puerto Rico and St. Thomas to learn about their lives.

Sometimes I get lucky and uncover old photographs, but more often than not they're unlabeled and undated. So I study the clothing, the studio, the style of the image, the framing, the paper they're printed on, the faces of the subjects, anything that can help estimate the date and place or identify the people.

Every new type of document, record or artifact requires a knowledge base in order to evaluate its authenticity and understand its significance.

When I first started more than twenty years ago family history research required spending hours and hours in dusty libraries scanning rolls of microfilm until I was nearly seasick from the jumping, weaving images. I paged through delicate church registries in white archive gloves hoping to inch back another generation. I used library phone books to find possible distant cousins in other regions and wrote hundreds of letters that began, "You don't know me but I believe we are related...."

Suddenly--and it does seem sudden--we find ourselves in the future. Millions of records have been digitized and indexed. Phone directories are online. People share their research on family history websites hoping to collaborate with others researching the same lines. And best of all, social networking has been embraced even by the AARP set.

I like to identify an immigrant ancestor then find every one of his or her descendants all the way to the present day. I've done this with two lines so far, and I'm onto a third, a 4th great-grandfather named Archibald Liggett who made the journey from the British Isles to St. Thomas sometime around 1800. Archibald had five children. Two sons and a daughter stayed in St. Thomas; one son went to Philadelphia (my line) and one went to Louisiana. I'm determined to fill in this whole family tree.

I've recently discovered that one branch of the Liggetts of St. Thomas  migrated to Costa Rica, and what's more, I've connected with a new-found cousin in San Jose. I love meeting new cousins, not just because I gain new family information but because connecting with another descendant of a immigrant ancestor reminds me that a long time ago one person changed the course of generations by leaving his homeland to build a better life for his family. 

In the course of learning more about Costa Rica, I discovered their version of beans and rice, gallo pinto. I poked around the internet for a definitive recipe then smacked my forehead and thought, wait a minute -- I have the inside track! I asked my new cousin for a recipe and he was happy to oblige. I've edited a little for clarity.

My beloved cousin Marce,

Responding to your request about one of our typical dishes Gallo Pinto, I asked my wife who really knows how to cook, well she teaches in a cooking academy Cocinart here, cause I do not cook is not one of my strongest points, but in the other I love to eat very well, probably cause I got used to it cause my grandmother Myra May and my mother Andrina were great cooks.

Before we go into it let me explain certain facts

• Rice is one of the most basic ingredients in Costa Rican diet
• Beans the same, you could find them Black, Red, White, baby beans, Cubaces that are a bit bigger and so on, we eat them in different ways and at any hour.
• Gallo Pinto is called like that because the mixture resembles the spots of a rooster.
• We eat it at breakfast, most usually with fried or scrambled eggs on top and with a tender or fresh cheese also with bacon or ham or chorizo, also with something sweet as French toast or fruits as melon, strawberries and of course with coffee, it is like a small brunch.

Well here is what I’ve got for you

For preparing it, you should have already prepared rice or cooked , better from a day before.

Rice:

2 spoons of vegetable oil

2 spoon of copped onions

3 cups of normal white rice (washed and drained out )

Boiling water

Salt at taste

¼ of a red pepper cut in slices (optional)

To be cooked in a microwave oven. In a big pan, (usually they sell the ones for cooking rice) you put the rice the salt and the vegetable oil , the onion, boiling water to cover the rice surpassing it 1 cm. or so (1/2”) set the heat to hi till it drays, take it out and  stir with a fork one or two times. Lower the heat, add ½ a cup of boiling water, the red pepper and cook at low heat for 10 minutes, and should be ready. Take it out and stir again with a fork till is loose.

Beans:

In Costa Rica when you are going to cook beans we say “ Voy a poner frijoles” or  I’m going to put beans,  not cook. Over here you can get them at the supermarket in a 1 kilo (2.6 pounds) packages.

You wash them well and leave them in water for at least one hour. You can cook them in a slow cooker or better in a pressure cooker so you’ll finish sooner. You put them in the pan then you add 1 garlic, 1 celery straw, thyme and oregano, and if you like it coriander and sufficient water salt to the taste. After the sound of the valve you leave them cooking for 30 to 35 minutes more at low heat. You then let it cool, so you can open it, then the salt is verified to taste,  and the tenderness of the beans.

In a fry pan with two spoons of vegetable oil, 2 spoons of chopped onion, chicken broth to the taste, till the onion is transparent, then you add it to the cooked beans. The first day we have what we call sopa negra if the beans are black or just bean soup if they are of other color, with cooked eggs, and avocado on it also with rice .

Gallo Pinto

Having already cooked rice and beans from the day before, in a big fry pan, cook 2 or 3 spoons of vegetable oil, 2 or 3 spoons of chopped onion till   the onion is transparent.

Add 3 cups of cooked rice and 1 and a half cups of the baked beans from yesterday, stir and blend, add 1 spoon of Lea & Perrins sauce; we use Salsa Lizano .

(From Marce: I was not familiar with Salsa Lizano, so I went to our favorite Latin American/Caribbean grocery to get it. Apparently it's very popular; there was lots on the shelf.)

Then the onion is added then chopped red pepper and coriander. Blend and serve. If you like hot sauce you add it or leave it to the people to make the choice.

Enjoy.

These beans were incredible. I followed the recipe exactly except I cooked the rice in a pan instead of the microwave, and of course I didn't use chicken broth. We ate them with a Field Roast Chipotle Sausage and a couple of leftover sweet potato tamales in banana leaves. Delish! Thanks, cuz.

Black is the New Bean

When I decided to stop eating meat, I was determined to be smart about it, especially since I was feeding a growing child. I read whatever I could find about a healthy vegetarian diet and discovered that most sources emphasized the need for protein. For ovo-lacto vegetarians that meant eggs and cheese, and for all vegetarians, grains and legumes. Not only was vegetarian cuisine new to me, but I was also transitioning from a classic German meat and potatoes diet. (We were so German that my mother referred to cream cheese as "smearcase", an Anglicization of Schmierkaese, and Swiss cheese as "Schweizer." And she was two generations away from a native German speaker!) 

Legumes were a new world to explore because I hadn't eaten many different kinds of beans growing up. We had the usual New England baked beans at big family picnics in the summer. Occasionally we had lentil soup, which I found boring. Later I learned about hummus and fell in love with it, but I didn't know what else you could do with chick peas. And red kidney beans were the basis for the gummy re-fried beans served at chain Mexican restaurants as well as an essential ingredient of Complementary Pie, the signature dish from Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, the official post-hippie, pre-locavore cookbook.


Then in 1980 I was part of a film crew that traveled to the archaeological site at the Mayan ruins of Copan in western Honduras to make a documentary of the dig. As anyone who's ever taken an introductory course in Anthropology knows, there are many theories about the decline of the Maya civilization including war, overpopulation, peasant uprising, and the decline of trade. More recently the theories have focused on environmental factors like disease, climate change and mismanagement of land. The director of the dig we were shooting claimed that to satisfy the ruling class's desire for more wealth the good agricultural land was used for cash crops -- cacao in the Mayan era -- forcing subsistence farming into the hills where the yield was not enough to support the masses, leading to malnutrition, disease, and a steep decline in the population.

Our job as filmmakers was to illustrate this theory, a job made easy by the fact that, as the director pointed out, the same conditions existed then as in the Mayan period. The population was rising, the good agricultural land was being used for tobacco, and much of the local population was growing subsistence crops in whatever little patches of arable land they could find. We loaded into a pickup truck and bounced into the hills along the Guatemalan border to film the process. First we shot a couple of men scaling the steep slopes planting wherever they could by poking a hole in the ground with a long stick, dropping in a seed, then tamping the soil with a foot. Then we found a father and his two small boys harvesting their plot of beans by hand, bending over to pull up the plants with the dried beanpods attached. From there we filmed a man threshing the beans, and then wind winnowing, all by hand.

It gradually dawned on me during the day that these were black beans, much smaller than kidney beans, dark and beautiful. I learned that these are the preferred beans of this area of western Honduras and of Guatemala. And I learned, as I ate them for lunch made by the local women who cooked for the archaeologists, that they are delicious. From that point forward I've loved black beans, of course because of the taste, but more because of seeing those beautiful descendants of the Maya eke out a simple living in a most beautiful place. To this day I feel privileged to have been allowed into their world, and to record a way of life that may, for all I know, be long gone.

Black Bean Chili

3 cups black turtle beans
2 bay leaves
2 large onions, quartered and thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tbsp corn oil
1 ancho chili
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1Tbsp oregano
1 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1 1/2 tsp Hungarian paprika
1/4 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 to 1 tsp chipotle chili in adobo sauce
1 26 oz box of chopped tomatoes
salt to taste
juice of one lime
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro

Soak the beans overnight in water to cover. The next day, drain the beans and cover with fresh water. Add the bay leaves, bring to a boil, then turn down heat and simmer until beans are just about tender.

Place ancho chili in 350F oven until it's puffed up. Stem and seed the chili, then tear it into small pieces and grind it in a spice mill. Add to that the cumin, oregano, the paprikas and the cayenne.

While the beans are cooking, saute the onions and garlic in oil until the onions are golden. Add the chili mixture and stir for a few seconds, then add the tomatoes. When the beans are nearly tender, add the tomato mixture to the pot. Add the chipotle. Simmer for a while until the beans are fully cooked, then add salt to taste, lime juice and cilantro.

I like to make this chili a day or two ahead because it really improves with time. Serve garnished with any combination of cheese, more cilantro, chopped egg, green onions, sour cream or anything else you can think of.

We ate the chili with quesadillas. It's a stick-to-your-ribs meal for cold and snowy weather, which is what we've got here now.