A Columbus Day Soup

Navy Bean Soup with Grits

The soup is somewhat of a triangulation. It lies somewhere among the bean soup my mom made when I was a kid, Heidi Swanson’s lima bean soup with chipotle broth, and posole. If I had had whole corn on hand, and time to turn it into hominy, this would have been closer to posole. Using the grits inspired me to use the pumpkin, so the recipe has the three sisters (corn, beans, squash); adding chiles makes this recipe even more appropriate to be served on what I grew up calling Columbus Day (and seems to be becoming Indigenous Peoples Day). I think this soup might be even better with baby limas; they make such a lovely silky broth on their own and cook more quickly. I also think this soup would be good with some bitter greens like arugula or kale tossed in toward the end, but I like that in anything.

Click through for the recipe

1 cup grits (I used blue corn grits from ansonmills.com)

2 cups navy beans

½ cup pancetta, diced, or 1 smallish smoked ham hock

1 large yellow onion

Chicken stock

garlic

5 or 6 chiles (Hatch, Anaheim, Poblano, or any other meaty pepper with medium heat)

Sun dried tomatoes

1 can pumpkin (not pie mix, be sure the only ingredients listed are pumpkin and maybe water and salt)

If you have a favorite way to prepare grits, do that. I put 1 cup of coarse grits with 5 cups of water and a teaspoon of salt in the slow cooker set on high until it reached a low simmer, then set on low until done. Anson Mills grits, prepared this way, need no butter, but their grits are coarse and take about 3 hours to cook. Taste for salt several times towards the end of cooking.  For use accompanying this soup, I prefer to cook the grits ‘til they’re done, then let them cool off and firm up so they don’t merely mix in with the soup in the bowl.

Pick through the beans, discard any pebbles or dirt or worm-damaged beans. In a medium pot, bring 6 cups water to the boil. Remove from heat and add beans. Let soak, covered, for a couple of hours. If you start soaking the night before, no need for the boiling water.

Once beans are soaked, start making the aromatics for the soup. If using pancetta or a really fatty pork, dice it fine and cook in a big pot until it’s well browned. A stock pot is fine, I use a heavy dutch oven for this soup. When the pork is browned and the fat has rendered off, add the onion, chopped coarsely. Sauté the onion over a fairly high heat until it begins to caramelize. Once that happens, add stock and water totaling about 4 cups, the beans (drained), 3 or 4 whole cloves of garlic, and a couple of sun dried tomatoes. If your pork is in the form of a smoked hock and didn’t need to be browned, add it whole at this point. Bring all these to a boil and then reduce to a simmer. After an hour or so add the chiles* and the can of pumpkin. Keep simmering until the beans are tender and smooth, which can take up to 3 hours. If the garlic cloves are still intact, mash them. If you have an intact hock in the soup, consider removing it, cutting the meat up into little morsels and returning them to the soup, but some families can peaceably and cooperatively pick off the meat from the bone and share it. Taste for salt towards the end of the simmering time; your pork and stock may add enough salt, but ours didn’t.

Serve in wide, shallow soup bowls, with a big dollop of nice firm grits in each bowl.

*on the chiles: We are very blessed to have a bar owner in our neighborhood who is a chile fanatic. Every fall he rents a U-Haul in Hatch, New Mexico and brings home over a ton of newly harvested chiles for his annual “chile roast.” He sets up a gas-powered tumbling roaster in front of his bar and he and his crew roast around the clock for the weekend. His menu is full of special chile items that weekend, and he also sells the roasted chiles in 7-pound bags. We bring them home still hot, divide them into recipe-sized portions, and freeze those. This happens in October, and our stash never makes it to Christmas. The best ways to eat this are the simplest: mixed in with scrambled eggs, made into a spoon bread and served with pinto beans, added to chili or posole, dumped into fried rice.

If you’re on your own when it comes to chiles, any medium-hot, fleshy pepper like Poblano or Anaheim will do. Cook them whole on a hot grill or under the broiler until the skins are uniformly charred, let them cool in a glass bowl covered with a plate or plastic bag, then peel off the charred skin, and remove the stems, seeds, and seed-bearing membranes (unless you’re a hot food junkie going for the tingling-lips capsaicin high). Save the juice that comes out of the flesh as the peppers cool and add it to the soup.