Is it OK to eat beans for breakfast? – 09/20/2023 – Gross Kitchen

There are more than a few British eating habits that the rest of the world considers, to say the least, questionable. I will try to list them during my London season, but today I will stick to one that speaks to Brazilians: beans in sweet tomato sauce for breakfast.

They are called baked beans, even though they don’t appear to be baked. As far as we know, no one prepares their own baked beans: tradition dictates that they be bought canned, from the Heinz brand, which holds 60% of the bean market in England.

Baked beans are so relevant to British domestic culture that The Economist magazine published an article speculating on their origins.

Apparently, the indigenous people of North America already prepared beans with animal fat, especially bear and deer. European settlers switched from hunting to pork and introduced sugarcane molasses into the business.

Boston baked beans – the Massachusetts city is famous for the recipe – are borderline sweet. I tried them in the USA and, perhaps for that reason, I thought that English beans were equally inedible.

They are not.

Here, the baked beans arrived through Heinz itself, an American company with operations in many countries (including Brazil). “The Heinz factory in Wigan, northern England, is the largest food processing plant in Europe and produces around 3 million cans of beans a day,” says the Economist text.

Baked beans are small white beans, of a variety known here as haricot (“beans”, in French). In the United States, the same beans are called navy beans.

They come in a not-too-sweet tomato sauce – less sweet than ketchup, for example – and are typically eaten on toast for breakfast. They usually feature in the full English breakfast, a morning feast that also includes bacon, eggs, sausage, black pudding, roasted tomatoes and mushrooms.

In one week in London, I had this titanic breakfast twice. And, let me tell you, it’s really good.

If you think beyond the standard routine, the same habits that are repeated automatically, you will see that there is nothing bizarre or extraordinary about eating beans in the morning.

The English full breakfast is a tradition that comes from manual workers who wake up very early and need a lot of energy for the day’s tasks. Here they eat beans with chorizo, in the Northeast of Brazil they eat yams, pumpkin and fried tripe.

Each culture defines what is appropriate breakfast food with criteria that, to outsiders, seem random. Japanese eat pickled fish. For Americans, eggs are a morning food, always. They don’t like eggs at dinner, for example.

In Rio Grande do Sul, rural breakfast includes country beans. They are black beans with chunks of pork, almost an express feijoada, which I tasted and approved at Parador Hampel, in São Francisco de Paula.

If the gases caused by the beans are the reason for the strangeness, think: the morning is the best time to generate them and release them into the atmosphere.

The problem is eating beans for dinner.

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