by Natalie “Lee” Arneson
As we creep out of December and settle into the heart of January, it’s simple foods that begin to sound the most appetizing. With the cold keeping a firm grasp on the PNW, our energy declines and cooking can feel especially taxing some days. So, something easy like rice and beans sounds best to me.
In a previous installment of Feeding the Diaspora, I referred to rice in its many forms as a cultural unifier, and I’d argue that beans are an equal cross-cultural connector. Something about the combination of the two is familiar and comforting no matter what way they’re cooked.
A common beans and rice combination in my household was Spanish rice and frijoles. Growing up in SE Portland, we were never short on ethnic grocery stores, including a multitude of tiendas and supermercados. A usual haunt of my family was Supermercados Mexico on SE Division Street. Alongside our typical purchase of short ribs from the butchers (because of course the meat we use in kimchi jjigae was purchased at our local Mexican grocery) we’d often pick up containers of their homemade refried beans and arroz rojo, usually to accompany the raw marinated meats bought from a Mexican food truck parked outside a convenience store just further down the street. Though not my foods culturally, they’re still a familiar comfort by way of where I grew up and the people who lived there with me. While it’s undeniable Portland, Oregon is an incredibly white city—the current census reading 73.8% white—I was lucky enough to grow up in a largely multicultural area, and naturally we picked up recipes from coworkers, neighbors, restaurants, and the internet over the years. So, if we weren’t buying it from the supermercado, my mom was cooking her own Spanish rice and black refried beans.
In the past couple of years, a childhood food of my dad’s has been making a resurgence in our intergenerational memory. Reignited by an episode of the cooking show Korean Food Made Simple with Judy Joo, my dad recounted how his mom would make a dish called japgokbap (잡곡밥), also known as Korean multigrain rice. Japgokbap is often composed of a mixture of grains and beans such as sorghum, millet, azuki beans, black beans, kidney beans, sweet rice, brown rice, black rice, and sometimes even chickpeas. In the cookbook Dok Suni: Recipes from my Mother’s Korean Kitchen, author Jenny Kwak writes above her recipe for japgokbap “[s]ixty to seventy years ago, native Koreans steamed rice with a variety of grains and beans for added nutritional value. This rice recipe is associated with pride and tradition for many Koreans. It’s comfort food that warms and heals.” While my family and I have yet to make japgokbap ourselves, Dad enjoys picking up a container at H Mart’s deli on occasion.
At my own apartment, I find myself parodying my mom’s black refried beans, though I’m sure I’m at least a little off the mark. If I’m feeling particularly exhausted—or even just lazy—I find myself going to the pantry and pulling out a can of black beans. Throwing them into my trusty non-stick pan, I cook the beans with some light olive oil, diced yellow onion, garlic powder, black pepper, salt, and sometimes butter for added richness. I mash the beans with the back of a wooden spoon as they cook, pouring in water as needed, until they’re just the right consistency. While all this is happening, my rice cooker is also going, and by the time I’m done with the beans my rice is ready too, and what I have is something so simple, so tasty, and so low effort. It’s become a staple for me, and little else can beat the satisfaction and inexpensiveness of these two together—and when you’re living on a tight budget, simple and inexpensive is about all you can afford.
At the end of the day, it really is the simplest dish that can bring the most satisfaction.
Feeding the Diaspora is a column created by Natalie “Lee” Arneson in March 2022 to share stories on multicultural identity and how food plays a large role in continuing and reclaiming cultural ties. Defining ‘Diaspora’; a diaspora is formed when people belonging to a cultural and/or ethnic group are living in a place that is not their or their ancestor’s country of origin.
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