Beans and Greens

I am helpless before the crumbled, buttery goodness of the Ritz cracker. Even though I have not lived below the Mason-Dixon line in 19 years, my true palate remains Southern at heart. So when I read a recipe that involves Ritz crackers used in place of bread crumbs, I can’t really resist. Especially when it is suggested by someone as distinguished as John T. Edge, head of the Southern Foodways Alliance, in the virtual pages of Gourmet. Mr. Edge recently posted a casserole variation on a Frank Stitt gratin, and its publication happened to dovetail with a couple of my other current cooking interests, namely beans and greens.

Mr. Edge’s slow downgrading of the original recipe started with canned beans, but part of my inspiration for making this dish had to do with my recent discovery of Rancho Gordo’s magical Alubia Criolla bean, which is basically a Mexican heirloom variety of a white runner bean, as perfect and creamy a white bean as you can imagine. Once I made my first batch, I was on the lookout for anything I could use them in. And along comes Mr. Edge with his beans-and-greens casserole, coinciding with the appearance at the farmers market of beautiful, peaced-out collard greens grown by the Buddhists at Green Gulch. The stars were aligned for my California-fication of Mr. Edge’s casserole-ification of Frank Stitt’s gratin.

I prepared my beans on Sunday night and arrived home from work on Monday ready to whip up a little healthy justification for eating Ritz crackers (budgetary note: cost of Bellwether San Andreas young sheep’s milk cheese, organic green onions, and two slices of applewood-smoked bacon at Whole Foods: $8.79. Cost of one box of Ritz crackers and one roll of Reynolds Wrap Heavy-Duty Aluminum Foil at the Alpha Foods in Cole Valley: $8.49. This is why city people shop at fancy markets like Whole Foods, because their neighborhood, non-fancy markets are just as expensive).

The one thing I did not count on was a massive Cole Valley power outage. I was sautéing green onions and collards when the lights went out. No problem, I thought. I have a gas stove, the burner is still aflame, everything will be fine. The only problem was that the gas oven is dependent on an electrical spark to fire the pilot light, and my gas oven (maybe no gas oven?) does not maintain a consistent heat: the pilot light is fired, heat is generated, the pilot light goes out, then is fired again. With no electricity, the pilot light can’t re-fire itself. So there I was with a Pyrex baking dish full of perfectly creamy white beans, sautéed collard greens and onions, fresh chopped rosemary snipped from the bush in my yard, bacon, grated San Andreas, crumbled Ritz crackers, and drizzled olive oil, but no working oven.

San Francisco, you might have noticed, is not the South. It is the place that many people go to escape the South. And while I grew up in the rapidly developing Atlanta suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s, which are arguably not the South either, the South of church supper potlucks and neighborly drop-ins lingers in my mind because that’s the South my parents grew up in. Whether you meet them through church suppers or writing workshops or wine tastings, the key to maintaining that small-town Southern hospitality feel is knowing your neighbors. And lucky for me, I have two friends in the neighborhood who live east of Cole Street and so are on a different electrical grid than those unlucky citizens of darkness on the west side.

Yes! Yes of course you can use our oven, my friend K. insisted. C’mon over.

I wrapped my Pyrex dish in a sheet of expensive Reynolds Wrap and made the 4 ½ block trek to electricity. Oh the comforts of the modern world! Neighbors, electricity, Ritz crackers, organic collard greens, and heirloom Mexican runner beans!

In all the confusion of the power outage, I’d misread the recipe and baked it for twice as long as necessary, but it was still delicious. Have a piece, I urged K. Have a piece, I urged her daughter. Have a piece, I urged her husband when he arrived home from saving a different neighbor from the consequences of the power outage (stuck on the N-Judah, an occurrence that isn’t dependent on a massive power outage). It was delicious, we all agreed, and maybe more so for the contribution of neighborliness and good friends, two things not limited to geographic borders.