Boiled Beans

Black-eyed peas soaked, cooked until tender and seasoned with salt. That is the entire recipe, and it is deliberately so: this is the base that a great many Nigerian bean dishes are built from, and it is eaten plainly in its own right. In Nigerian usage, beans without further qualification usually means black-eyed peas, ewa in Yoruba, agwa in Igbo, wake in Hausa. They are indigenous to West Africa, domesticated there thousands of years ago and carried to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, which is why they are as central to Southern American cooking as to Nigerian. Eaten plainly, boiled beans go with a pepper sauce, fried plantain, fried yam or bread, and that combination, beans and bread, beans and dodo, is everyday food across the country. From this same pot come the more elaborate dishes: ewa agoyin with its dark fried pepper sauce, honey beans, beans porridge. Two things in the method deserve keeping. Picking through dried beans for stones is not fussiness, small stones do get through commercial sorting and they break teeth. And salting only at the end is correct, because salt added early toughens the skins and lengthens the cooking considerably. The source's extensive nutritional and weight-loss claims have not been carried across.