Beans à la Limeña

History

Frejoles á la limeña is a plate of dried beans — frejoles, also called porotos — soaked a full day, their loosened skins slipped off, then simmered for hours with onion and a piece of unsalted fresh pork fat and worked into a sauce of pork lard, chopped onion and ground garlic until they collapse to the smoothness of a purée. Beans are native to the Americas: the common bean was domesticated in the New World, independently in Mesoamerica and in the Andes several thousand years ago, and legumes count among the old staples of Peruvian cooking. What makes the dish limeño is less the beans than their partner. The recipe is emphatic that at Lima tables the traditional bean dish is never served without a second dish of rice — arroz graneado, the grains cooked loose in pork lard — and it gives this couple a name: San Pedro y San Pablo. The rice is the Spanish contribution laid over the native bean.

The name carries the story. San Pedro y San Pablo is a documented Lima criollo dish of beans and rice, tied to the June 29 feast of the two apostles and recorded in the criollo culinary tradition that Ricardo Palma drew on — two saints always named as a pair standing for two dishes never set apart. The better-known tacu-tacu, in which leftover beans and rice are mashed together and fried into a cake, grew from the same coastal bean-and-rice habit and is generally credited to Afro-Peruvian cooks of the colonial coast; Gorriti's version keeps the two dishes side by side rather than mixing them, and is the earlier, unfried form of the same pairing.

Zoyla T. de Vivero sent the recipe from Lima, and it is she who names the dish 'el tradicional plato de frejoles' of Lima tables. What the recipe does not tell us is why the pairing took the apostles' names, or how far back the custom reaches; the feast-day connection is documented in later writing rather than spelled out in the 1890 text, and whether this particular household version descends from a long line or is de Vivero's own is left unsaid.

Ingredients

• Dried beans (frejoles / porotos)
• 1 head Onion
• Fresh unsalted pork fat (tocino fresco sin sal)
• 1/2 pound Fresh pork lard (grasa de chancho)
• 2 heads Onion, chopped
• 2 cloves Garlic, ground
• Salt
• 1 pound Rice (arroz)

Instructions

1. Soak dried beans in cold water 24 hours, remove the loosened skins, and wash well.
2. Cook the beans in cold water with an onion and a piece of unsalted fresh pork fat.
3. Boil half a pound of pork lard with two chopped onions, two ground garlic cloves and salt until golden.
4. Add the beans and stir constantly (cooking at least three hours) until broken down to a purée; add the pork fat cut in pieces.
5. For the rice: fry chopped onion, garlic and salt in four ounces of pork lard, add a pound of washed rice, then cold water to cover; cover and cook gently half an hour until loose-grained.
6. Serve the beans with the rice (in Lima this pairing is called San Pedro y San Pablo).