Learning To Clean The Beans: A Latino Rite Of Passage

I remember being a little girl on my tip toes peeking over to see what my mom was doing, making very methodical sounds, looking very concentrated, staring over a pile of beans on the kitchen counter and carefully allowing them into a bowl before they were washed, then cooked. I’ve always loved beans, but before I knew what was involved in “cleaning” them prior to cooking, it used to look like magic.

“What is she doing? How does she do it?” I remember asking myself, but that was before the mystique of bean cleaning was revealed to me, before I learned the family secret to cleaning the beans.

I’m sure that, back in the olden days, bean cleaning was a much more important part of the entire bean experience. If you were growing your own beans, or buying them from your neighbor, all pre-agribusiness, it was likely you’d get lots of rocks, bugs and pieces of dirt in your beans. Nowadays, however, after opening up the plastic bag and dumping them out onto the counter, I feel lucky that only rarely do I find any rocks in my beans.

Once my mother initiated me into the rite of cleaning the beans, I was amazed to find that not only is the process much simpler than my younger self initially believed, but it makes sense. Do you want your family to eat things they shouldn’t? No, so you take it out before you cook it. Obviously you’re going to remove the rocks, but in my family we also remove the beans that look weird, the halves of the beans and then wash them thoroughly before placing them in the lead-laden jarrito for a few hours.

Now that I’m an adult and have cooked my own countless pots of beans, and even though I do not have my own family, when I’m cleaning those beans I’m sure I share the same look of stern concentration that my mother had when I watched her all those years ago. After all, while we can joke about being “beaners,” the truth is that beans are a huge part of my family’s diet, an integral part of the food that allows us to live our lives.

So, when you learn the rite of passage of how to clean the beans, it’s not just a route process that means nothing. On the contrary, it is a rite of passage, because what you’re learning is how to care for yourself, how to care for the people you love the most, by caring for them in one of the best ways — feeding them good, healthy and clean food.