By Heather Ariyeh
Note: If you would rather, we can even set up a Zoom or Skype meeting and you can teach me how you prepare beans and rice!
Background
Do you have a favorite memory or recipe related to beans and rice?
Throughout the world, people have combined beans and rice to form popular dishes. Together, they form a complete protein, but perhaps even more interestingly beans and rice are foods in a relationship that form a grammar expressing both common histories and local specificities.(1) In particular, beans and rice dishes trace the history of the African Diaspora into the Caribbean, the United States South, and beyond.
Project
I am working on a cookbook of beans and rice dishes, but one that will go a step beyond recipes and offer personal stories related to these dishes. These memories may be more broad in nature (relating to culture or place), or very specific and unique to individual households or experiences. What connections do you have to beans and rice?
Instructions
If you would like to take part, please submit any or all of the following:
- Memories of any length, even a few sentences
- Photos
- Recipes or just an interesting twist you’ve added to a classic
- We can even set up a Zoom or Skype meeting and you can teach me how you prepare beans and rice!
Feel free to be creative, but don’t feel pressure to be creative! It’s just an excuse to share a bit with one another. This cookbook is an art project, and part of my thesis work at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. It is not part of a commercial endeavor. The final format may exist in print or online. You will be credited unless you prefer not to be. Please submit contributions or questions to: Heather Ariyeh at hariyeh@sva.edu .
Please ensure all submissions relate to beans and rice together in some way (whether mixed together or separate on a plate). Sides or main dishes are both fine. Any type of rice or bean is fine (including peas, black-eyed peas or cowpeas).
Click below for common examples.(2)
- Bandeja Paisa
- Arroz con gandules
- Casamiento
- Arroz junto
- Feijoada
- Gallo pinto
- Hoppin’ John
- Kongbap
- Moro de guandules
- Pabellón criollo
- Platillo Moros y Cristianos
- Rajma
- Red beans and rice
- Rice and peas
- Waakye
- Orez Shu’it
Below is an example submission. I hope you will be inspired, but not limited by it.
Chocolate Beans and Rice: A Recipe from Old and New Dreams
I came to the U.S. illegally, with only my brother at the age of 16. My brother was 15. We left our mother, father, and six more brothers and sisters behind in Guatemala. That was twenty years ago, and we haven’t been able to risk going back home since.
In the U.S., I work in the restaurant business. I always wanted to cook when I was in Guatemala, but never really had the need or the opportunity. In my family it was sort of an unwritten rule that the men don’t cook, but every day after working with my dad on our farm, I would sit in the kitchen with my mom while she was cooking. When I came to the U.S. there was no one to cook for me so I had to learn. I didn’t speak English yet, so I got a job as a server’s assistant in a Mexican restaurant. I couldn’t afford to eat there, but I noticed that the customers were paying $3.99 just for a plate of beans and rice, so that was one of my first experiments. The first few tries did not come out right. I stirred the rice too much and it was almost like a dough, but I realized that I could use this technique to make a certain style of Guatemalan tamale, so all was not lost. Eventually though I figured out my own version of Guatemalan beans and rice – a recipe made partly from what now seems like a dream of my mom cooking back home and partly from the reality of learning on my own. Since I came to the U.S., I’ve reached three out of four of my goals. I have worked my way up from server’s assistant, to server, and for the last five years I’ve been a manager. I’m learning a lot about the restaurant business, but someday I want to have my own place and sell my own food made from my own recipes.
I found family in the U.S… Not the kind you are born into; the kind you make out of the circumstances life gives you. In this family there is a daughter who is ten years old, but I’ve known her since she was two. When she was little, I made her my black beans and rice. In Guatemala, we blend our black beans into more of a paste, but where we live in Oklahoma, whole pinto beans are more common. She had never had Guatemalan food before, so when she saw the beans she yelled, “chocolate beans!” because they looked like chocolate to her. We didn’t know if she would like them since they weren’t going to taste like chocolate, but to this day she asks me to make “chocolate beans” for her.
References
- Wilk, Richard and Barbosa, Livia, Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places (London/New York: Berg Publishers, 2013), 304 pages.
- Wikipedia. 2020. “Rice and Beans.” Last modified December 5, 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_and_beans