Spek en Bonen (Bacon & Beans)

Spek en bonen — bacon and beans — is about as plain as a recipe gets, and that plainness is exactly why it has lasted. It is Brabant farmhouse food, the pot a smallholding put together from what the garden and the smokehouse gave: a summer's glut of green or runner beans, a few potatoes, and a chunk of the smoked bacon that hung in every rural kitchen. Humble enough that its name became a Dutch idiom — voor spek en bonen, "for bacon and beans," meaning to be there but not really count.

The whole meal in one pot

There is no trick to it, only good order. The bacon is rendered first so its smoky fat becomes the medium everything else cooks in; the onion sweetens in that fat; then the beans and diced potato go in with just enough liquid to stew rather than boil. As it cooks the potato softens and breaks, quietly thickening the pot into something between a stew and a very thick soup. One bowl, with bread and mustard, is supper.

Cheap, smoked, filling, and honest — the kind of pot that fed a working family and asked almost nothing in return.

Soft beans, on purpose

Modern cooks flinch at cooking a green bean past bright and squeaky, but this dish wants them properly soft, the old farmhouse way, tender enough to give against the tongue. The traditional seasoning is bonenkruid — summer savory, the "bean herb" whose peppery, thyme-like scent is bound up with Dutch bean cookery. A little smoked bacon, soft beans, collapsing potato, a dab of sharp mustard: it is the taste of a Brabant summer kitchen, unpretentious and quietly satisfying.