This post was originally published on Substack

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On February 5, 2021—nearly a year into the COVID-19 quarantine—I sent my mom a text.

“Los frijoles se tienen que poner a remojar antes de cocinar?”¹

(Do you have to soak beans before you cook them?)

I was nervous about sending this text because it meant coming to terms with a critical kitchen deficiency of mine: as a daughter of Mexican immigrants, I didn’t know how to cook a simple pot of pinto beans.

Here’s the thing: beans are having their moment in the foodie world.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Samin Nosrat kicked off her Home Cooking podcast with an episode on beans. A year later, in her departure from the New York Times, she ended her column with an ode to beans.

The cookbook Cool Beans by Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan dropped on February 4, 2020, eerily arriving just before the United States went into quarantine. (Granted, he started conceptualizing the book back in 2016, but that’s some coincidence.)

The early months of 2020 created the perfect storm for beans to make their breakthrough as the cool, trendy new food du jour. They’re cheap, they’ll last virtually forever in your pantry, and they’re highly nutritious. One cup of dry beans yields about three cups cooked—that’s a hell of a return on investment. As leaving the house to find our food became an event steeped in risk, beans ascended in the American consciousness as a balm in this new, infectious age.

But for immigrant families in the United States—at the very least, my immigrant family—beans are nothing new. Writer Jay Miranda notes,

It’s an experience so universally known amongst first-generation Latino-Americans that it’s become a running internet joke. So it goes: you’re a kid begging your mom to take you to some fast food joint and your mom is shouting, “¡Hay frijoles en la casa!”

I can’t admit that I have any memories of my mom ever actually saying the phrase, “¡Hay frijoles en la casa!’“ to me. Still, I did grow up with the regular presence of beans on our stovetop.

Beans—or rather, frijoles, and in particular, frijoles de la olla—were ordinary. My mom simmered our frijoles in a reddish, earthenware pot decorated with white swirls that looked to my kid brain like the number 66. In the afternoon, we could sit down to a piping hot bowl of frijoles swimming in a rich caramel broth of their own creation, garnished with freshly chopped tomato and queso fresco or queso cotija. I always wanted my bowl to be about 90% beans and 10% broth, even though my abuelita would always tell me stories in which the lesson was that the best nutrients were in the broth. (My abuelita is an oak tree of a woman, so anything she says about nutrition, I believe her.)

From there, the leftovers could take any new, second life. They might be mashed up on a Sunday morning and smeared onto a warm telera for a torta, or sauteed with some chorizo and spooned into some white corn tortillas. Culinary magic, really, but to me, frijoles just were. They were a constant. Ol’ reliable, if you will. And yet, I grew up and left home and decided that I didn’t need to cook frijoles de la olla.

I don’t know why. Maybe I was bored with frijoles. Likely I thought that when the day would come that I did want to cook frijoles, the recipe would just spring forward from the encoding in my Mesoamerican DNA and that I would just know how to cook them. They couldn’t possibly be a dish that I needed to practice making. Plus, the idea of keeping an eye and ear on the stove for hours, of using all five of my senses and my intuition(?!) to make sure the beans were done right, just didn’t vibe with my early-20s cooking style of “dump it all in a slow cooker and walk away.”

I got older and, thankfully, a little smarter in regards to cooking. When I watched Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat on Netflix (and then read the book, of course), it was like Neo finally seeing the Matrix code. There was a reason why my parents’ food was always so delicious: years of practice and of honing that kitchen intuition, yes, but also a mastery of the elements that made any food, from any cuisine, feel like fireworks in my mouth.

The humble bowl of frijoles de la olla, a tradition passed down for centuries, is a microcosm of everything that makes food so damn good: the transformation of beans, in a warm bath, from speckled stones to creamy little bullets of flavor; the acidity of fresh tomatoes; and the salt and fat from a heaping of grated cheese. Ordinary, quotidian, and yet also, hardly that.

It took me putting some distance between myself and frijoles de la olla to finally recognize them for the brilliance that they are. And, as I witnessed the rest of the culinary world begin to fawn over the humble legume, I decided it was time to finally return to my own kitchen lineage.

In response to my text about soaking beans, my mom called me right away. She walked me through the process of making my first batch of frijoles de la olla: the aromatics (onion, garlic, epazote) to put in the water, how long to soak the beans (not long, just while you’re waiting for the water in the pot to boil), when to add salt (towards the end, or the beans will toughen up), how to tend to them (carefully, just a simmer, not a rolling boil), and how to know when they were done.

Yesterday, I finally worked up the courage to cook them. Now, I wish I could say that the magic flowed through me and that I made the best pot of pinto beans ever, but uh…

I forgot to put my aromatics in the water. I had too high a ratio of water to beans. I forgot the advice about simmering the beans and not boiling them, and when I scooped some beans in my ladle to check them for doneness, half of them had burst, their innards trying to escape out of their spotted jackets. Oops.

Despite all my omissions and mistakes, it was a victory. I added salt and tasted the broth until it tasted just right. For a few minutes, I found myself standing over the stove eating scalding spoonfuls straight from my first, fresh pot of beans. It wasn’t perfect—far from it—but it was one of the most fulfilling moments I’ve had in the kitchen, and I can’t wait to try again.

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