Don't Sweat the Aubergine

then bake at, say, gas mark 4/180°C to blend the flavours and brown the cheese. It’s delicious hot, even more delicious at room temperature, and most delicious lukewarm. For a generous amount for 4 people: 2 aubergines; 2 portions of one of the tomato sauces see here ; 2 balls of mozzarella; 2 tbsp Parmesan.
Beans: green beans
    The fine beans that are available all year round, and that usually come from Kenya, taste muddy and stale. As do Kenyan mangetouts. Unfashionable runner beans, with their sandpaper skins and stringy textures, are nevertheless much more vibrant in the mouth. Bobby beans, which may not look promising, can be good. The fine beans to go for, when you can find them, are the French ones.
    If you insist on the brightest green beans, throw them into a large pot of salted, boiling water, cook uncovered at a rolling boil for 3 minutes (the finest beans should be ready by then, but check – they may take a minute or two longer), drain and plunge into iced water. Reheat by tossing them over heat in butter or olive oil. However, this treatment does compromise flavour and nutritional value. Steaming is better and, provided you don’t overcook the beans, shouldn’t cause too much loss of colour. Tossing them immediately in oil helps to fix it, too. The acid in a vinaigrette, though, will turn them grey; don’t dress the beans until shortly before serving.
    Not all the ingredients of a hot meal have to be hot. Green beans are very nice at room temperature.
Dried beans
    It’s encouraging to hear that dried beans are good for us. But enthusiasm declines when we read warnings that we have to prepare beans properly to remove toxins. It drops further on discovering that writers do not agree on what that proper preparation involves. A publishing friend, whose famously scrupulous firm has brought out a book on bean cookery, tells me that various consultants disagreed to such an extent that the editors had to settle for advising readers to follow packet instructions.
    The three areas of controversy in the treatment of cannellini, haricot, kidney beans and others are soaking, fast-boiling and salting.
    Soaking . Leaving beans overnight in water speeds the cooking time. You’ll notice that the beans can double in size, so cover them by a good few inches. I’ll confess to the fussiness of soaking and cooking the beans in filtered or bottled water: our hard tap water seems to take longer to cook them, and to toughen their skins.
    Fast-boiling . If we don’t mind waiting a bit longer for the beans to cook, why bother with the pre-soaking? Because, according to the Food Standards Agency, it means that a subsequent short period of fast-boiling will get rid of any toxins. Dried beans contain substances called protease inhibitors, which can block the digestion of proteins. The FSA advises that the inhibitors become inactive after 10 minutes of fast-boiling, provided that soaking has made the beans receptive to this treatment.
    Red kidney beans contain lectins, which can cause nasty stomach upsets. Soaking (the FSA recommends that you do so for 12 hours), 10 minutes of fast-boiling, and proper cooking should disable these toxins.
    The reason that the FSA encourages fast-boiling is that the high heat under the pan ensures a water temperature of 100°C. If you bring a pan to simmering point, then turn it down as soon as bubbles appear, the temperature may never reach a toxin-zapping level.
    There’s another side to the story, of course. Some people stick up for protease inhibitors, which, they say, have anti-cancer properties and prevent the formation of blood clots.
    I went to an expert on proteins and legumes. Dr Claire Domoney, of the department of metabolic biology at the John Innes Centre, tells me that she does not believe it to be necessary to attempt to inactivate the protease inhibitors. Their effect on protein digestion may be minimal, and is outweighed by their health benefits. In any event, some of them are too stable to be affected by boiling.
    However, Dr Domoney does agree with the advice about destroying the lectins in red kidney beans.
    Salt . ‘In my experience, once [beans] meet salt, they never give in,’ writes Fergus Henderson (
Nose to Tail Eating
). My reason for leaving salt out of the cooking water is different. I put two lots of beans – they were organic haricots – on the hob: one in unsalted, the other in salted, water. I tasted them after an hour. Both, despite what Henderson and