Victuals & Drink, Volume 2 number 5, May 2000 White Hot! About once a year I make a big pot of white bean chili, and it always gets snaffled off right away. It’s really more of a chili-flavored soup, and I tend to make it fairly mild, but a good hot batch is easily done and tastes yummy. Ingredients:
First, wash and prepare small white beans (navy beans or flageolet beans work well) in the usual manner, soaking them overnight. These beans aren’t quite so flatulence-producing as kidney beans in my experience, so I will use the water they have been soaked in to cook them in. They don’t take as long to get tender, either. Put the beans in a big pot on the stove and heat. Add a few bay leaves and a bit of water and cook ’em for a while. Add a large chopped yellow onion and a few peppercorns. Keep cooking, stirring every once in a while so the beans don’t burn and stink up the house. While the beans are cooking, chop up carrots, yellow winter squash (pumpkin, acorn squash, turban squash—you name it), parsnips, turnips, rutabagas, cabbage, and celery root (also known as celeriac). I usually don’t have all of these, but the essentials are carrots, cabbage, and squash. Red cabbage will make the chili slightly purplish or grey, so to keep the colors sunny I usually use green cabbage. Throw in with the beans. Add chicken broth for liquid. Take a few small hot yellow peppers (adjust to taste) and add. I grew a pepper called Hot Lemon in my greenhouse last year, and it is a long jalapeño-shaped pepper, rather small, but VERY hot and very good in this soup. But any good hot chili pepper will do. Keep cooking the chili, and add cumin, again to taste. Add water or more chicken broth to keep the chili from getting thick. When the chili is close to ready, chop up yellow and red sweet bell peppers and yellow crooknecked squash or zucchini and add. Add ground caraway seed (just a little), thyme (lemon thyme is best), sage, rosemary, fennel seed if you’re feeling adventurous, and a bit of mace (and whatever else strikes your tastebuds). Keep tasting and adjusting the seasoning. Add soy sauce for salt, but be careful—chicken broth can be salty, too. The chili, as I mentioned, should have the consistency of a nice chunky soup with a rich but not especially thick broth. Serve hot, with a dollop of sour cream in each bowl and some chewy bread on the side.
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