Most kitchens have a tin of beans or chickpeas sitting at the back of a cupboard, bought with no plan and kept out of vague good intentions. It is the most useful thing in there. A drained tin is protein, bulk and texture that needs no soaking, no planning and about eight minutes.
Five dinners, in rough order of effort
Crisp them. Drain, dry on a tea towel, then fry in a hot pan with oil until the skins split and blister. Salt, and whatever spice is open. Eat with yoghurt and bread, or scatter over anything. Stew them. Onion, garlic, a tin of tomatoes, the beans, twenty minutes. Add greens at the end if there are any that need using. Mash them. Warm with oil, garlic and lemon, crush with a fork, and you have something to put toast, an egg or a roast vegetable on top of. Soup them. Blitz half the tin with stock for body, leave the other half whole, season hard. Salad them. Cold, with raw onion, oil, vinegar, and any herb or tinned fish in the house.
Don’t pour away the liquid without thinking
The starchy liquid in a tin of chickpeas whips like egg white and is worth keeping if you bake. In any other tin, the liquid is a thin, seasoned stock: a few spoonfuls loosen a mash or thicken a stew far better than water does. If a recipe wants the beans clean and separate, rinse. If it wants them creamy and held together, don’t.
Tinned beats dried on a Tuesday
Dried pulses are cheaper and better, and they want a night of soaking and an hour of cooking you decided on yesterday. Tinned pulses are ready now, which on a weeknight is the only property that matters. Keep both if you like. Cook the dried ones on a weekend, freeze them in portions, and you have tins you made yourself.
What turns beans into a meal
Beans on their own are flat. They need one acid, one fat and one sharp thing: lemon or vinegar, oil or butter, and something with edges — raw onion, chilli, a hard cheese, a pickle. Get those three in and almost any tin becomes dinner. Leave them out and it stays a tin.
Keep three tins in the cupboard and you are never more than ten minutes from a real meal. Crisp, stew, mash, soup or salad — the tin decides very little, and you decide the rest.