Making Good Beans

Alright. I'm going to take a break from free writing about my dissertation today to free write about beans instead. Good beans are a subject near and dear to my heart -- whether we're talking about frijoles refritos (refried beans), cassoulet, or white bean soup. I am the mortal enemy of any Pythagoreans out there with their silly prohibition of beans. (I never liked that pesky theorem, either.)

I'm thinking about beans today because I have some beans in the slow cooker. I put them in first thing this morning and, as I write my dissertation during the rest of today, they'll be on their way to becoming refried beans. So they're on my mind, and their smell is going to be wafting into my office all day, and becoming stronger as the day goes on.

I like to cook. And I like to look at a lot of recipes before I finally settle on a recipe, or combination of recipes, to use when cooking a dish. My beans recipe is based on a lot of trial and error, cook book and internet recipe perusing, and advice from my Mexican mother-in-law. Lately, a few people have told me that they have trouble making good, soft beans for their refried beans. So I though I would share some of what I have learned from trying and adapting the different recipes into my own.

1. Make time for the slow soak. Some recipes suggest that the slow soak is optional and present an alternative, quick soak method for cooking beans. The quick soak does work. And if you're in a hurry to make some beans, go ahead and use this method (although it will still take all day to cook the beans, so you haven't really saved yourself much time). Now, as effective as the quick soak is, I think that the flavor does suffer a bit. So plan ahead. Measure out a pound of dry pinto beans (about 2 1/2 cups), rinse and sort them, and put them in a large pot or bowl. Cover them with at least a couple inches of water (more water won't hurt them, and it's better to use more than less). Cover the pot with a lid or some plastic wrap and let them sit overnight. The beans will soak up the water and grow to 2-3 times their dry size. And they'll have done it slowly without losing any of their flavor.

2. Use a slow cooker. You don't need a slow cooker. But if you have one, it is really handy for this recipe since it is going to take several hours to cook. Discard your soaking water, rinse your beans once again until the rinsing water runs clear, and place the beans in the bottom of your slow cooker.

3. Add a few things for flavor, but NO SALT. One mistake that I have seen in a lot of recipes -- even ones with very good online reviews -- is that they recommend adding salt (sometimes a lot of salt) to the beans in the beginning of cooking. I don't know why they would recommend this, because it will definitely keep your beans from becoming soft and silky. They will retain some of their chalky texture if you add salt early on. Save the salt for seasoning after the beans have cooked.

What I add to the beans for flavor is the following: 1 diced white onion (for Mexican cooking, white onions are almost always preferred), 4-5 minced cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of thyme, 1 bay leaf, 3-4 dried chiles de arbol, and one small can of diced green chiles. I put all of this in the slow cooker with the beans from the beginning. You might also consider using jalapenos, cumin, oregano, or chile powder, depending on your preferences. (Some recipes I've read suggest cutting your onion in half and putting the halves into the slow cooker without dicing, and then removing the halves in-tact once the beans have finished cooking. I suppose that this will work, but I personally like having the onions add to the texture of the finished product. The only things I remove at the end of cooking are the chiles de arbol, the bay leaf, and the stems from the thyme.)

4. Pre-boil your water. Some recipes would have you pour water straight from the tap into your slow cooker. However, this is then going to take quite a while to heat up and will potentially add another hour or more to your cooking time. I have found that it is best to boil a medium-sized pot of water on the stove and use this to pour over the ingredients in the slow cooker. This get things going more rapidly. And because you're just boiling clean water, you don't have to wash another pot when the cooking is done.

5. Time. A lot of recipes just get the cooking time wrong. One recipe that I used as the basis for my refried beans recipe is from EatingWell Magazine (reproduced on Cooking.com). This recipe was very helpful in giving me the idea to add thyme and to use pre-boiled water, etc., but it just was way off on the cooking time. They recommend 2 to 3 1/2 hours of cooking on high. But this is at least one hour short of what is actually required. Maybe they're using a super-hot slow cooker (although I already feel like my slow cooker is pretty hot), but this still seems like a large gap. My tip is to get to know your slow cooker. Check the texture of your beans every half-hour or so once they've cooked for 3 1/2 to 4 hours. Overcooking is not a problem with these beans -- in fact, the longer they cook, the better they will be -- so don't worry about it. Undercooking is the problem.

6. You don't need to fry them. Some recipes recommend frying the beans in lard or bacon fat once they are cooked. This is a fine method. But if you are vegetarian, or if you just don't want to get out a frying pan, you can skip this. Like in this recipe, I prefer to simply remove and reserve the excess liquid from the beans using a ladle, mash them (adding some of the reserved liquid back into the beans as I go), and then season them to taste with salt, pepper, and maybe some dried oregano. (I then save the unused bean broth for making soups, or for substitution in anything that might ask for chicken or vegetable stock.) I do not recommend using any type of blender at this point, because you are not making a puree. You want the beans to have an uneven consistency -- smooth but lumpy. Mashing is the best way to achieve this, although I know it is tempting to want to pull out the immersion blender and be done with it. A smooth potato masher like this one is going to be your best friend here; a wire masher is going to make for slow-going because the beans will so easily slip through the gaps. I used to use the wire masher -- it worked, but my arms are happy that I switched to the smooth masher.

That's the end of my allotted time for blogging for today. And that's pretty much the whole story of how I make my refried beans. Maybe I should really quickly try to relate it to Harold Urey. As I mentioned in yesterday's post, one of the ways that Urey paid his way through college in Montana was as a server in the dormitory cafeteria. He remained proud of the fact that he could wait tables, and according to his son he would often show off at parties his ability to carry many plates at once on his arms. He wasn't much of a cook, though. His son also told me that the only thing he cooked were waffles on the holidays. But, anyway, here is a photo I was able to dig up of Urey demonstrating his skills as a server. This is from the UCSD archives (who I hope won't mind if I share this; I will take it down if they object):

What to Make of a Country Boyhood

It's difficult to know what events in a person's early life later came to define their personality, their ways of thinking, or their politics. It's especially difficult when the person you are writing about tended to avoid discussing the particulars of their early life. But even when you know someone's entire life story -- your own, for example -- is it really so easy to put your finger on what it is that made you the way you are? Based on the amount of money and time people spend in therapy to answer just this question, I'm thinking that it's not so easy.

In my own case, I've never really been sure what made me the way that I am. My mother is an artist and my father is a surgeon. Is that the genetic or social equation for producing a poet/historian of science? And why does it only produce this result in one out of four instances (none of my 3 younger brothers has gone this route and arguably we've been exposed to most of the same experiences). Does the fact that I was born to a couple of graduate students and grew up while my father was in medical school explain why I have spent so much time in graduate school myself? It would be a convenient explanation but it's not very satisfactory. Not really necessary, not really sufficient. So it's difficult for me now to try to pick apart the life of someone I never met and try to explain what made them tick. I'm not a fan of armchair psychoanalysis. And yet this is what most people seem to expect a biographer to do.

Still, it seems very important to me (and to this project) to reveal as much as possible about Harold Urey's "country boyhood." Why?

Part of the reason is that I am not really interested in Urey's childhood as a source of identity for Urey, and so I'm not worried about using his childhood in order to construct him (or the problems that would come with this). I'm not interested in how an integrated self emerges from a life full of circumstance and experience. I'm not even sure I believe in personal identity in this way -- as the sum of all parts. (Although I am interested in the way that we retrospectively create order out of chaos when examining our own lives in the service of constructing our identities -- and for that matter the way in which we do the same thing to important historical figures in the service of larger arguments about time, place, etc.)

In Urey's case, I'm really interested in his childhood for two main reasons (maybe three):

First of all, it gives me some insight into the origins of one of the 20th century's celebrity scientists. We have to remember that when Urey was born at the end of the 19th century, urban and rural life were still relatively distinct entities. In some places more than others, people lived cut off from the changes that were occurring as American cities grew, working class culture emerged, and the heterosocial lifestyle we're familiar with today began to develop. Urey's family lived in just such a community. Not only were they relatively isolated geographically in a small farming community in northern Indiana, but they were isolated socially in a 'peculiar' religion (more about this later). My hope is that by studying Urey, I might be able to say something about whether or not those scientists who grew up in more traditional rural backgrounds brought the values of their rural communities into the American scientific community. Were the values of modern science really modern? Or were they an amalgamation of the cosmopolitan ideals of science (partly inherited from the previous generation of amateur scientists/men of leisure and learning) and the rural values that these new professional scientists brought with them to the scientific community? To this end, I am interested in examining the social and familial world within which Urey grew up.

Second, I'm interested in finding out what parts of Urey's life story did not make it into his official autobiographical and biographical materials and determining why they didn't make the cut. Some of the omissions to his autobiography (unpublished in its original form but later released in condensed form as a children's book) seem deliberate. Those parts that are left out are the ones that might have made him seem like a less-than-typical American success story. As he told it, his was a Horatio Alger-like rise from the humblest, poorest origins to the heights of scientific stardom. He was raised by two poor widows -- his mother and his paternal grandmother -- on a failing farm and only was able to attend high school because of a small amount of money left behind by his father's life insurance. He taught in one-room country schoolhouses until finally attending the University of Montana and working his way through school busing tables, working on the railroad, and digging irrigation canals. He then caught the eye of some influential professors, became a scientist, and landed at the UC Berkeley and Neils Bohr's Institute in Copenhagen.

Every bit of this story is true. But there was a lot more to the story. I hope to address a couple of these omissions in the next few posts over the next few days. For now, I just want to address the omission as a point of concern for me. In a conversation that I recently had with Urey's son, he suggested to me that it was Urey's All-American, rags-to-riches story/reputation that protected him from McCarthy. While McCarthy did call Urey before closed hearings, Urey's son suggests that he didn't dare call him before open hearings for fear that Urey's reputation was beyond reproach. Whether or not this is true, it certainly demonstrates just how important an asset the family believed Urey's life story to be.

But Urey's history of omitting his religious upbringing and certain other details of his childhood predate the Cold War and McCarthyism. The habit of hiding many of the particulars of his origins dates back at least as far as 1914. This was the year that Urey began school in Montana, and this was also the year that WWI began in Europe. It seems like more than just a coincidence that it was at this time that Urey began trying to shed his country accent and mannerisms, and to present himself as a regular full-blooded American. The alternative would have been to claim his ethnic German Anabaptist roots -- something that could have been very dangerous in Montana during this time (Montana turns out to have been one of the worst places in America to be a German American during WWI). In fact, this is just one reason why he might have wanted to cover up his roots (I think the reasons are overdetermined, really), and I'll get to these in time.

Again. If it seems like I'm leaving a lot out, I am. I plan to come back to this subject over the next few days as I get further into revising this chapter. But this post lays out at least a couple of my goals for the time being.

In the Beginning...

...there was the word. Or there were no words. There were not enough words, or there were too many words. Too many words to choose from, and circumstances words just could not describe. So, in the end, there was writer's block.

In all seriousness, though...

I am starting this blog in the hope that it may sustain me for the next few months as I finish revising the already written chapters of my dissertation and write the two chapters that remain. I'm thinking that if I write down what I am trying to do on a daily basis, as well as what I am accomplishing, this will help me to survive this intense period of writing that I'm entering. The goal is to have a complete and mostly revised draft of the entire dissertation by the end of July. It's by no means an impossible task, but it is going to require me to push through those parts of the dissertation that have been giving me trouble, abandon some of my pesky perfectionism, and just get words on paper!

So what is this thing? Why the reluctant biographer? Why the New Prophet?

I never planned on writing a biography or a biographical dissertation, and I'm pretty sure that most academics would have advised me against it. (And maybe in a future post I'll share some of my thoughts about the pleasures and pitfalls of academic biographies, but, well... not right now.)

I came to this Ph.D. program with the plan of writing a dissertation about the history of planetary geology as a discipline. I didn't want it to be a dry, technical history, but rather a social/cultural history of the enterprise. What I wanted it to be, however, is beside the point; I am not writing that dissertation.

Somewhere along the way I discovered and became fascinated by the American chemist Harold C. Urey. At first it was my interest in planetary geology that drew me to Urey. When I was writing my Masters Thesis on Mars exploration at ASU, Urey's name popped up here and there as a harsh critic of the hard rock geologists whose stories I was following. Urey was a pioneer in the field of isotope geochemistry -- applying the methods of nuclear chemistry to questions in the earth and planetary sciences -- and he didn't really like the competition of the more traditional mappers and stratigraphers of the USGS and the Army that NASA employed. I knew that if I was going to write a Ph.D. dissertation about planetary geology then I would have to learn more about Urey.

When I arrived at UCSD for my Ph.D. work, I was happy to find that Urey's papers were held in the UCSD library. So I started going over to our Special Collections library on a regular basis to start combing through his papers. (Over the years the librarians there have been very good to me -- I like to think they've become my patrons -- in addition to helping me with my research, they've employed me as a part-time rare book cataloger, as an oral history interviewer, etc.)

I recently found a picture of the Urey papers on taken on the day that his wife Frieda donated them to the library; it's kind of nice to see them as they once were, before the archivists cleaned them up and organized them:



Now, if anyone who is reading this has ever done archival research, you know that there is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome that takes over when you've spent days, weeks, or even months in someone's papers. Unless the person was despicable, you become attached to them and their life. You might, for example, find a folder of friendly correspondence between them and one of their peers -- a folder that represents several years' worth of conversations between the two of them -- and start to feel like you are a part of the conversation. And a strange thing happens to time in the archives. You might go from 1951's Christmas card to 1952's -- separated by maybe 25 letters that took you an hour or so to read -- and think to yourself, my gosh, is it Christmas again already? In short, if you let it, you can get sucked into the archives.

Alas, this happened to me. Urey -- who lived from the late 19th century into the penultimate decade of the 20th century -- seemed like the perfect surrogate through which to view the rise of American science in the 20th century. The fact that he was a Nobel Prize-winner and had participated as a scientist in WWI, the Manhattan Project, the rise of nuclear geochemistry and cosmochemistry, and NASA's early efforts at lunar and planetary exploration seemed to make him even more interesting. I started describing him as the Forrest Gump of 20th century American science (although he was a much more witting participant).

Then things got wonderfully complicated. While writing a paper for a research seminar, I discovered Urey's public speeches and found that during the Cold War he had become very insistent that American society needed both science and religion. This was not necessarily a novel statement in itself. However, it was the way that he framed the ideal relationship between science and religion in a democratic society that interested me. Urey insisted that science needed to be understood and applied in the context of the traditional moral teachings of the great religions of the world.

But his was not a conservative view of religion -- he was not invoking the "moral teachings" of the Bible in the way that we might see them invoked today in support an anti-gay marriage law. He had grown up in a very conservative religion and it was just this sort of abuse of scriptural authority that had led him to leave the faith. While he never openly declared himself to be an atheist, he certainly was not a believer (one of his former secretaries reported to me that he once told her that he believed there was some higher power, but that he couldn't speculate on what it might be).

In coming to the conclusion that society needed religion in order to make sure that science was not misused, I am now fairly convinced that Urey was affected by the trauma of his own wartime work on the atomic bomb, by the revelation of the Holocaust, and by the prospect of a Cold War nuclear holocaust. In his speeches he identified Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as examples of societies that have either "gone pagan" or atheist and where science had lost its moral compass. Shortly after the end of WWII, he reported that the clock had been reset; the world was living in the year AB 1 (Atomic Bomb 1), and more so than ever before the decisions of a few could determine the fate of the entire world.

But if science needed religion, religion was in just as much need of science. Urey advocated a modernization of religion -- a movement away from literalism and toward understanding religious texts as, for lack of a better term, moral poetry. He told his audiences that what the world needed was a "New Prophet" who could take the moral teachings of religion and combine them with the grand view of the universe that science was producing. Religion, if it was to remain an influential force in modern life, had to become less static.

Urey knew that he was not the new prophet he described. He felt that the only thing scientists could do in order to help the situation was to pursue scientific projects that would contribute to an inspiring view of the universe and human history. I believe that Urey took it as his own task to pursue such inspiring work, and that this was one thing that led him to his work in geochemistry and cosmochemistry during the 1950s and 60s. It certainly wasn't the only reason that he went into these fields, but it seems like it may have been one of the main reasons that he became so personally invested in them.

And this is how my dissertation became biographical. I want to be able to tell an important story about science and religion during the Cold War, and I want to use Urey's life story in order to do it.

Why am I a reluctant biographer? Because often it feels like an impossible task. Even with all of the time I've spent in the archives, talking to his surviving colleagues and secretaries, and interviewing his adult children, he still eludes me. He's enigmatic -- and his colleagues would have said this about him even when he was alive -- and his ideas and opinions were famously unpredictable. I feel hesitant to try and verbally pin him down on the page.

But. I must. And this blog will chronicle the attempt over the next few months to bring the story of Harold C. Urey to life on the page. (Or to at least give it as much life as a biographical dissertation can hold.) I will try to make posting here a morning writing exercise. I can't promise that I will always make sense. I can't promise that this blog will always (or ever) be worth reading. I can promise that there will be errors, complaints, and probably a lot of unattractive, mostly unedited prose.

And that's that.

Here's one picture of Urey, towards the end of his life. This photo was taken in 1980, the year before he died, at a party held in the honor of Urey's colleague, James Arnold. He could no longer really read at this point (and hadn't been able to for a while) because of macular degeneration, and he could no longer get around very well either because of advanced Parkinson's, but he still enjoyed a good party.



Note: Both of the images in this post belong to the UCSD library. Check out their 50th Anniversary History of UCSD website for more great photos: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/historyofucsd/digital.html#picmain