dinner party report: clams with white beans and chorizo

my new favorite dish for company :)

Haley is in town, and I invite her for dinner. Over the weekend I haul a pile of cookbooks out, most of them new, and I attack them with my battery of sticky flags. I find my answer in the new Rancho Gordo book: white beans with clams and chorizo. The photo warm looking, elegant but not overly staged, with splashed drips of red-oiled broth. I like the use of the word murky in the instructions.

I relish the planning, all week, even when it winds me up. I place a Fresh Direct order for clams and chorizo and seltzer and parsley and red vermouth because it’s been a long time since I’ve had a cheeky bottle of vermouth in my fridge, there to splash into seltzer when I want it. I’ve become too pragmatic in my grocery buying, and I’m trying to welcome back a little bit of lushness without, you know, spending two hundred dollars. Dinner is Friday and the groceries arrive on Thursday morning. I have to google, again, how to store clams in the fridge. I know they need air, but how? For a few hours they sit chilling in their open-mouthed paper bags. Then I lay them flat on a wide wooden plate I have, covered in a damp towel, thanks a Bon Appétit SEO article on how to cook clams. Eat within two days, the text warns, and I figure one and a half days is safe. I remind myself multiple times that this wait time is okay, that one and a half is less than two. The clams are fine; they are resting under a clean damp towel, like someone in first class.

I want to buy Rancho Gordo white beans, because—why? Because the marketing tactic of the cookbook has worked on me? I like their beans because they taste good, and it seems like there is a certain level of fair pay being offered to the farmers in this whole endeavor, and also because there is a novel level of variety on their website (I am certainly not finding black garbanzo beans or cicerchia beans or domingo rojo beans or mayocoba beans or rebosero beans or santanero negro delgado beans at my local Met Fresh) and also because the Food Establishment has so definitively claimed this outfit good and delicious and special that this definitiveness has relieved me of the need to develop my own opinion: I can simply outsource the discernment here—even though I like to think of myself as a discerning person and maybe even occasionally a member or at least former member of the Food Establishment—and accept these as the best. The beans are good, and they will not betray me.

I assume that Chicky’s General Store, my local shoppy-shop, will stock Rancho Gordo. I swing by after therapy and scan the shelves but no, they only have a lesser brand and not even white beans, so I walk out empty-handed. I scan the local map inside my head and default to driving the 12 minutes to Foster Sundry, a butcher shop that I love, the place I go if I want to splash out on some lamb shoulder. This is, I admit to myself, becoming a frilly little dinner, but what did I expect? It becomes imperative for me to burn fossil fuels to purchase heirloom beans for a dinner that nobody asked for but whose planning is giving me a sick little pleasure. From an early age I was fussy about food preparation—the child’s frustrated combination of aesthetic standards and the lack of words to express them. When I started cooking recipes from the Food Network—when I started making Rachael Ray’s guacamole—I would always hold back a tablespoon or two of chopped onion, sure that the extra bit would be too much, refining my own eye even arbitrarily. Foster Sundry has five different kinds of rancho gordo beans but there is one empty lane of bean bags and I know that that here lived the white beans. I remind myself that a different and perhaps more relaxed woman (consumer) would simply buy a different bean, but I am not that woman (consumer), and that is my cross to bear. I buy some sausages for me and Estelle because Estelle wanted sausages and I love nothing more than to bring her a little treat. Two chorizo verde, two burnt scallion.

Back in the car I resolve that I must call The Meat Hook even though I have some gripes against them but I assume that they would have rancho gordo white beans and I realize that in order to justify this extra ten minutes of errand-running I must call ahead and ask the question excuse me do you have rancho gordo white beans and when I call I say haha I know this is such a specific question but, as if the person there cares at all. They have it and I buy it and it is not the specific white bean called for in the recipe but I am not THAT crazy, I buy the ayocote blanco bean, and I tuck it into my bag and drive home and place it on a shelf until the evening when I will set it in a bowl to soak, even though the Rancho Gordo book says that you really don’t always have to soak. I’ve been burned too many times, spent too many hours hovering over a pot of beans that won’t soften, and even though I know this usually happens with the really old stuff that has been sitting on shelves forever, not the ayocote blanco beans that were likely plucked and dried within the last twelve months, this is my habit and I hew to it.

The recipe requires just the right amount of preparatory fussing. First in the morning I cook the beans, and I try them the way the cookbook recommends: no chicken broth, no aggressive seasoning, he even waits to salt them until the end. Just some sautéed onions, a shake of oregano. They turn out lovely, delicate, but next time I cook beans I will use chicken stock again, and add in all the other crap I tend to add. It’s good sometimes to attempt restraint, it shows me that restraint is not my resting state.

After the beans are cooked it’s just a bit of chopping (onion, garlic, tomatoes, chorizo—the hard spanish kind that I love so much but never buy, and which stains the oil and onions and wine with its hot red fat) and adding and stirring. It is a tidy meal—on the side I’ll serve good bread and butter. When I’m feeling particularly fancy I like to soften butter and then spread it across a tiny shallow ceramic bowl, butter knife flattening the butter flush with the rim, like they do at restaurants. I am no martha stewart but I love this sort of flourish. And a sprinkle of salt on top.

I light a few candles and when Haley arrives I realize, with a funny little shock of terror, how romantic this all looks. As if I am wooing her. But then again I love to woo my friends, and the dinner party is an inherently romantic act, even when that romance is platonic. We laugh over the candles and the flowers on the table, picked from the community garden; we eat the clams as we sort through gossip, and dunk bread into our pools of broth.

When I reheat leftovers the next day, I think of Kirsten Dunst in Drop Dead Gorgeous saying, Mom always says, 'Don't ever eat nothin' that can carry its house around with it. Who knows the last time it's been cleaned’. Of course, my clams are fine, and I’m amazed by how well everything reheats, shells and all. I am thrilled to have a little extra chorizo in the fridge, and first make choripan, perhaps one of my favorite snacks in the whole world, for which I resolve to “write” a “recipe” someday soon. For months the clams and beans will sit swaddled in my top-of-mind recipe collection as the ideal dinner party dish, romantic and rustic and red.

Alubias Blancas With Clams and Spanish Chorizo

From The Bean Book by Steve Sando
Makes 4 to 6 servings

White beans and seafood may not seem like an ideal pair, but the mild beans in this recipe take on a lot of flavor from the clams. You can throw in other types of seafood here too—it’s easy to improvise.

Spanish chorizo is much different from Mexican-style chorizo. Mexican chorizo (and longaniza) is made with ground pork, chiles, and spices and then put into casing. Spanish chorizo is cured and aged with a completely different texture, and in this case, it’s a nice contrast to the creamy beans.

MB note: if you’re pescatarian, you could make this without the chorizo and just add some good smoked Spanish paprika; I’d start with a half teaspoon.

4 cups cooked white beans, such as Rancho Gordo Alubia Blanca or Caballero beans, bean broth reserved
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 white onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/2 cup finely chopped Spanish-style cured chorizo
2 plum tomatoes, chopped
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 pounds small clams, scrubbed well
Chopped fresh parsley for garnish
Country-style bread and butter for serving

In a large pot, heat the beans in their broth over medium-low heat.

In a very large lidded saucepan (or dutch oven), warm the olive oil over medium-low heat. Add the onion, garlic, and salt and cook until soft, about 5 minutes. Add the chorizo and cook gently until some of the fat has rendered, about 5 minutes. Add the tomatoes and wine and cook to allow the flavors to mingle, 5 to 6 minutes. Increase the heat to medium and add the clams. Cover and cook for about 5 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally.

Uncover the pan and cook until all of the clams open, another few minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, then remove and discard any clams that failed to open.

Add the clam mixture to the bean pot and stir very gently until well mixed. Simmer for a few minutes to allow the flavors to mingle but not get murky.

Ladle into large, shallow bowls and sprinkle with parsley. Set out a large bowl for discarded shells and encourage your guests to eat the clams with their fingers. Pass plenty of good, hearty bread and rich, creamy butter at the table.