Pigs Out. Beans. Angels’ Share.

This morning I could hear the water spigot on the side of my house running to fill animals’ water troughs. This small sound told me that autumn is here. The irrigation must be turned off for its end of season scrape-out. The five foot deep canal at the top of the property was cut along a topographic contour line of our valley by men one-hundred years ago using horses and carts. Today the rich deposits of grey silt that run down from the mountain and collect in the canal get cleared out by excavator. The silt is dumped over the edge onto our land, giving the soil a little dose of mountain minerals. Here it mixes with the annual drop of acorns and oak leaves, a thick brown carpet of tannin and soil building organic matter.

The second sound of the morning seemed unrelated until my mind put the images and sounds together. It was a text message from a neighbor who said all our pigs were out - escaped- and cruising along the irrigation canal. Possibly disturbed by the excavator, as well as the allure of acorns, the pigs had pushed through the fence.

It is always the prerogative of a pig to push through the fence. When there is more food on the other side than in their pen, they feel it is their duty. What are carpets of acorns for after all? Or the pear orchard littered with yellow pears — too many for the wasps to cope with. The pigs will be there; like stubby black-uniformed cops on the beat. The fence is always only ever a suggestion. Mostly cows, goats, pigs will happily take the suggestion if they are provided with what they need: a new stretch of green grass, enough supplemental hay, clean water, buckets of grape waste from the winery, occasional scratches behind the ears.

Nature has this beautiful way of fuzzing the lines. Nothing is ever one hundred percent perfect, squared-off, complete. There’s always a little wiggle room so something else good can get in, so evolution can happen, or so the acorns get cleaned up, put to their rightful purpose, so that there is breathing room.

In winemaking we call it the Angels’ Share. A portion of the wine in its barrel — this precious, expensive liquid — evaporates because a barrel breathes. Beautiful, natural products, barrels are made by artisans — coopers — who, in their craft, commune with the oak, creating these perfectly curved and gently sealed vessels. The best cooperages even have ancient relationships with the oak forests from which the wood comes. The wine loses volume via the porous oak as it sits in the cellar over the months or years of its élévage. And the wine is better for it. It concentrates and has an exchange with oak. You don’t want too much evaporation or too little but there’s some amount of permeability to the boundaries that’s just right.

We close things into fences or barrels or time-frames but its really this exchange with edges that creates the magic. We don’t want the pigs running wild all over the land, or the beautiful grape juice carelessly sloshed around and exposed to too much air; rather it's a gentle shepherding, suggesting a route toward the good.

I’m cooking Zolfini beans today. A sweet little pale bean with a slight sulphur yellow tinge, hence its name (zolfo is Italian for sulphur). They are known for their thin skins — their permeable boundaries — which make them easily digestible. They taste entirely sweet and nutty with a creamy texture. Zolfini were rediscovered along old Roman roads in Tuscany and brought back to life by dedicated people growing and cooking and eating them.

Cooking beans need not be the dubious process of soaking and long cooking that is often recommended.

With a few little tricks they can be easily shepherded from dry storage item to weekly comforting staple meal. First trick is cooking beans with thin skins, like Zolfini. Second, beans that were grown less than a year ago, and third, I use a step for cooking beans I read in Patience Gray’s Honey from A Weed. I bring the beans up to a boil with about a teaspoonful of baking soda. On another burner I start a kettle with enough water to cover the beans by twice their volume. Once the beans and baking soda boil for a few minutes I strain off the now sulphur yellow water and cover the beans with the fresh boiling water. I add salt now; along with a sprig of sage, a clove of garlic in its skin, a piece of chile, and a drizzle of olive oil. Then simmer gently for an hour or two. This will depend on how old your beans are, so keep tasting, you don’t want them to go to mush or to be unevenly cooked. I grow beans because it’s so nice to eat them within the year after they are harvested. Newer beans won’t even need to be soaked prior to cooking with this method.

A pot of beans like this, with lots of broth is a perfect meal, or they become the basis of several meals. The broth is as rich as a meat broth. Add a piece of garlic-rubbed toast and a drizzle of good olive oil. Or you can separate the broth and make another soup, and eat the beans with rice or in pasta e fagioli. Get some parsley and parmigiano involved.