Corona beans

Eastside Road, August 17, 2012—

CORONA BEANS TONIGHT. I don't recall when we first discovered them, but I think I know where: in the warehouse of a food import business in Portland, a business friends had established back in the 1980s, I think now, and ran successfully, gradually moving from their basement to a first small warehouse, then another where we met those beans, then ultimately quite a large operation, with employees and trucks and accounts and such.

It was private enterprise, small capitalism, entrepreneurship as all Americans say they want to see it, and it succeeded beautifully, and it still obtains, though our friends have retired from it and moved on to other things, and the new owners, a national company, will no doubt take it to a new and different place.

And where, I wonder, will we now buy our Corona beans. They came in big clear plastic sacks, ten pounds at a time I think, or some metric equivalent: for they were imported from Italy, I believe…

Lindsey cooks them "the way you cook beans," she says, soaking them and simmering them, and tossing them with chopped shallots and crushed garlic and salt and olive oil and marjoram. They're big, beautifully textured, meaty. When I take one between my teeth and bite it just so it splits along its natural cleft (or is it cleavage), exposing the amazingly smooth surfaces of the two halves to my exploring tongue. They are, after all, seeds, embryos, potential lives; eating them I do not destroy that life, but take it into my own. The great cycle of life is reaffirmed. And it tastes great.

Green salad. Half a cantaloupe.

Cheap Côtes du Rhône, "Caqves du Fournalet," 2011: nice flavor, good balance.