Good Old Red Beans And Rice.

[title type="h6"]Good Old Red Beans And Rice.[/title] A writer working on a book about Southern food wrote to me today about chicken bonne femme, a classic if not especially common Creole dish. She wanted to know where it came from and which of the various recipes out there was the real one. The latter issue is hard to say. The three restaurants that serve it with any kind of regularity (Tujague's, Antoine's, and Clancy's) each make it very differently--although potatoes and garlic always seem to be part of the recipe. More intriguing is the name. "Bonne femme" means "good woman." A scholar of French who called me on the radio one day said that the woman so described was not merely good, in the sense of being a good mother and homemaker. She was also carrying out that role in the face of hard times, with an erratic husband, and too many and too often malnourished children. I don't have to think too hard to envision that. Although things got better by the time I was in my early teens, my own mother easily fit the description of the bonne femme. She even made that dish--but, of course, in a way different from the three above. We had it on Sunday. And then there was "good old red beans and rice." That's what she called the red beans we ate on Wednesday, or maybe Friday. (We always had them on Monday, no matter what.) I don't remember things as being really horrible, but according to my sisters, maybe they were. Still, my mother made do, and I learned that red beans really do get better the second or third day. Mary Ann made a pot of red beans yesterday. She deviated from the norm by using no animal fat in the initial cooking, substituting olive oil. She did, however, slip in the last few remaining sausages from yesterday's grilling. We were too full to eat the beans yesterday, but I woke up thinking about them today. As soon as the show ended, she warmed them up and we sat down to eat them, in obeisance to New Orleans culinary tradition. They were great. Needed a little salt and hot sauce (the latter is my own above-average usage), but that's easy to fix. The texture was great, the beans discrete and the sauce at the perfect midpoint between thick and runny. Sausage disks floating around were the right kind and number. "Yum!" I said, not just for her benefit but also as a gut response. Delicious. Perfect, even. I am married to a latter-day, somewhat upscale bonne femme. I don't say that nearly often enough.