Stay at home? Cool beans!
I wanted to make bean soup, but there were no beans.
It was the week after Easter, and in my mind, Easter is the prime excuse to lay in a year’s supply of chocolate malted milk eggs and glaze a great, big traditional ham. Now this year’s lock down and stay at home order was no deterrent to my acquisition and preparation of a smoked hog hindquarter regardless of the number of empty chairs circling my dinner table. I am a man not only unfazed but inspired by leftovers – quite happy to roast a 20-pound turkey to satisfy a yen for a Henry XIII style drumstick, a club sandwich and stuffing.
So while the church year’s first alleluias livestreamed into the kitchen, that fine cut of cured pork went into my oven soon to yield a traditional Easter ham dinner, which, in turn, would yield the traditional Easter ham bone, which, in its time, was to yield the traditional Easter ham and bean soup.
When that time came, I had the bone, but lacked the beans.
No great problem, or so I thought. For as long as I’ve been shopping, dried beans have been among the most benignly neglected items on the supermarket shelves. Generally tucked away on the very bottom tier in the general vicinity of the canned condensed soup, bouillon cubes and pre-simmered chicken broth, bags of beans generally gather dust as folks too busy to fuss hurry past to snatch up items less demanding of their oh-so precious time. I simply assumed my greatest challenge would be to decide if I preferred great northern or navy; only to be confronted with an expanse of empty stock space and three lonely sacks of large limas – apparently too intimidating for the novice bean boiler to bother with.
And not only was my regular grocer lacking legumes, there were no lentils, no dry peas, pearled barley or any other of the 19th century-style foodstuffs only us culinary curmudgeons were prone to pick up. There was but a bag or two of do-it-yourself rice left lonely where several paddies-worth were normally displayed. The sale of flour had nearly ground to halt, the stock reduced to a few bags of all-purpose the purchase of which would be without purpose since there was no yeast on the shelf to leaven it. The pancake mix was missing as was the syrup to go with it, and the apparently robust demand for oatmeal must have put a grin on that somber Quaker’s face.
I suppose it might all be a symptom of continuing COVID covetousness, but perhaps it’s more profound than that. Corona may be causing us to relearn to cook.
There is incentive. With fare from our favorite eateries only available over the transom, since the eve of St. Paddy’s Day, we’ve been bringing home the limp fries and wilty lettuce that are the inevitable result of carrying out what was intended to be eaten in. Over the course of days, enough of us have sat down to $20 foam-clamshells of congealing pasta and de-crunched garlic toast, looked at the deep green box of Creamettes gathering dust on the shelf and concluded, “I could do this myself.”
And since we had nowhere to go and nothing better to do, we did; and suddenly elbow macaroni is a premium product and muffin mix is in short supply.
Meanwhile, my hambone found a home in my freezer. Beans will be back on the shelf soon enough – after all, the TP aisle is again well stocked as people came to the realization that stay at home or go to work they were still only going to poop once a day. Still, if some of the folks rediscovering their kitchens – or discovering them for the first time – develop a taste for a good home-cooked meal this stay-at-home order may result in more staying at home than anybody anticipated.
Which might not be a bad thing.
As long as they leave some beans for me.