By Matthew Welsch
The best thing about life after Easter is the leftover ham! If you’re still sitting on some Easter ham in your freezer, let’s put it to good use, because with these chilly May mornings and evenings, it’s a great time to make soup beans, one of my lifetime favorite dishes.
Now, soup beans can be a polarizing subject. Folks make them different between the North and the South of the state, and I’m sure there are differences from Hill to holler. However, I am beyond certain that every version is fantastic, and I would like to humbly suggest that my version may be the ultimate.
Before we go any further, let’s talk about what soup beans are not. They are not bean soup. Ham and bean soup is a wonderful dish, to be certain, but this is not that. Soup beans are also no brown beans — another Appalachian staple most ofen served with cornbread. Brown beans are soupy pinto beans, and while the ingredients of both bean soup and brown beans maybe the same, these are all different pens in the pasture. I believe that soup beans should be the consistency of a really good baked bean — thick and creamy and something you can put on a plate with some fried taters and eat with a fork.
Any bean can make soup beans. Traditionally, pintos are most often used, but I have always used white northern beans. Maybe it’s because I grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line. But in my experience, this makes a superlative soup bean.
Another way I break from tradition is by using canned beans. Purists like to labor over a sack of dried beans. Picking it for small stones and rinsing and soaking and boiling and all of that. But we didn’t have dried beans growing up. We had cans. So that’s what I’ve come to love and use most often.
The recipe is simple. Just give yourself plenty of time. And as with most soups and stew — it only gets better the next day.
Yankee Soup Beans
Yield: 5 qt
2 ea Yellow Onion, minced
4 ea Cloves of Garlic, peeled and crushed
1 qt Ham, small dice
½ C White Wine
1 gal Canned White Northern Beans
1 ea Ham Hock
½ C Bacon Fat
Heat bacon fat in 5.5 quart dutch oven. Once the fat is shimmering, add 1 minced onion (reserve the second minced onion for garnish) and cook until translucent over medium-high heat. Add diced ham and cook until all the water is cooked out and the ham starts to get some color.
With a wooden spoon, work the caramelized bits of ham and onion up off the bottom of the dutch oven. Those golden sticky buts are fond, and fond is packed with rich flavor. Once ham is fully rendered (starting to stick but not burn), add white wine and really work all the fond off the bottom of the dutch oven with the wooden spoon.
Once white wine is mostly cooked off, add beans, bean liquor, and hamhock. Bring to boil, then turn down to low simmer and stir occasionally for 3 or 4 hours.
Serve with raw onion as garnish, fried taters, and cornbread with plenty of butter.
