Soup Beans

Soup beans — dried pinto beans simmered for hours with a piece of salt pork, fatback, or a ham hock, seasoned with little more than onion, salt, and pepper, and served over cornbread with raw onion on the side — is the daily food of Appalachia. Not the Saturday food, not the celebration food — the Monday-through-Friday food that sustained mountain families through the Depression, through the coal camp era, and through every lean period in the region's history. Pinto beans were the cheapest available protein; cornbread was the cheapest available starch; together, they provided nutritional completeness. The dish is so central to Appalachian identity that Ronni Lundy calls it "the foundation of mountain cooking" in *Victuals*. It is the Appalachian equivalent of Louisiana's red beans and rice (LA1-06) — the daily bean pot that defines a food culture.

Dried pinto beans soaked overnight, then simmered in water with a chunk of salt pork or a smoked ham hock for 2-4 hours until the beans are completely tender and the cooking liquid has thickened into a rich, starchy broth. The beans should be soft enough to mash with the back of a spoon but should mostly hold their shape. The broth — the "soup" in soup beans — should be thick, bean-flavoured, slightly smoky from the pork, and substantial enough to soak into cornbread without disappearing. The dish is served in a bowl with the beans and their broth, a wedge or chunk of cornbread on the side (or crumbled into the bowl), and a thick slice of raw onion.

Cornbread (crumbled into the bowl or served alongside), raw onion, chow-chow, fried potatoes. Hot sauce if available. Buttermilk to drink. This is subsistence food that became comfort food that became identity food — the same arc as red beans and rice, as feijoada, as every bean-and-grain dish in the diaspora.