Frijoles Charros Norteños

These beans belong to the north. Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon, the cattle states, the wheat states, the parrilla states. This is wheat country, not corn country, which is why the tortilla on the table is flour and not maiz. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and the north has its own.

The name comes from the charros, the horsemen who worked the cattle ranches and ate from a communal pot at the end of a long day. Pinto beans, whatever pork was in the smokehouse, tomato from the kitchen garden, chile serrano or chiltepin pulled fresh off the bush. Nothing fancy. Nothing precious. A pot built to feed working people from the same ladle.

The technique is straightforward but the order matters. Cook the beans first, no salt, until they are tender. Build a sofrito of bacon, chorizo, ham, and tomato in a separate pan. Marry the two and simmer until the broth carries the smoke and the spice and the fat of all three meats. La manteca es el sabor, and in this dish you get three kinds of it.

I spent two summers cooking my way through the Noroeste, from the marisquerias of Bahia Kino to the asado pits of Monterrey. Every cook had her own pot of charros on the back burner, ready for whoever showed up. One senora in Hermosillo told me her secret was a single chiltepin crushed into the broth at the end. Another in Sabinas Hidalgo swore by half a beer. They were both right. No me vengas con atajos: this is a slow pot, but every step is honest work.