Les Haricots Tarbais

Back in my intrepid youth, when my hair dipped below my ears (when I had hair, that is…), I flirted with vegetarianism. I should probably say it was more than a passing fancy; I was a vegetarian for about six years and even worked in a vegetarian restaurant. At Cabbagetown Café in Ithaca, New York, we’d ladle up bowls of Cashew Chili or curious soups, like the one that a co-worker would insist on enriching with generous -and nutrictious – dollop of peanut butter.

And don’t get me started on the bizarre customers we’d get. We had one regular, whose name we didn’t know (so we just called her ‘Beyond’) who would sit in the dining room and order only a bowl of brown rice. Then she’d spend hours in the dining room writing in her journal, in the teeny-tiniest letters imaginable, eating her rice grain-by-grain.

Eventually I started eating meat again because I got tired of being served pizza smothered with soggy vegetables and was constantly dreaming about diving into a big, soft, overstuffed corned beef sandwich. When I told my ‘alternative’ doctor about that, he said, “You know, if you’re craving something, that means your body needs it. So you should probably go ahead and have it.”

With that advice, I left his office and made a beeline to the nearest Jewish deli, and ordered a big, honkin’ mound of hot corned beef barely contained by two sharp-crusted pieces of caraway-flecked rye bread with a smear of hot mustard. And from that day on, my vegetarianism was kaput.

But you don’t need to be a vegetarian to love beans as much as I do. The top bean for bean-lovers, the holy grail of beans, are the haricots Tarbais, grown in the southwest region of France near the Spanish border. Planted in May, then harvested between August and October, haricots Tarbais are hand-picked and commonly used in cassoulet, that rich casserole baked with confit de canard, meaty Toulouse sausage, sometimes mutton, and topped with oily-crisp breadcrumbs, then baked until dense, rich, and savory.

There are lots of variations on cassoulet, of course, but I often cook beans just as a simple side dish. And since it was time to kick out my roommate, the drunken French sailor, I picked up a sack of beans and headed towards the kitchen. Although I was sorry to see him go, he wore out his welcome (and everything I owned was starting to smell like pork.) So I figured I’d give him one last hurrah before he got the heave-ho, and I used him to flavor a pot of delectable haricots Tarbais.