THE canned bean is a very convenient thing. So is the dried bean, but it’s only convenient after a night’s soaking. When you need something very convenient, you generally need it right now, not tomorrow, which brings us back to the canned bean.



Keep a tin of white beans on hand, ready to toss with lemon juice, extra virgin olive oil, rosemary, sea salt and pepper, and serve warm with a few freshly cooked prawns, a grilled swordfish steak, or some canned tuna. (Look for Italian cannellini, French flageolets or Spanish alubias.) Add a tin of red kidney beans to a quick fry of minced beef with onions, tomatoes, cumin and cayenne, and serve with crisp corn chips and coriander.

You can make your own three-bean salad by mixing fresh green baby beans with butter beans and cannellini beans; serve black-eyed beans in a tomato sauce with grilled pork sausages; and warm a pile of borlotti beans in olive oil and serve with crisp bacon and curly frisee lettuce.

Some cooks use the bean liquid to thicken a soup or add extra flavour. I prefer to drain it off because it doesn’t have the same clarity of flavour as the beans, but it’s up to you.

Given that canned beans don’t lose much nutritional value by being canned, their only drawbacks are any added salt, and the lack of control over cooking times that you would get from soaking and cooking them from scratch. So always taste before adding any salt, and decide that there are times in life when you don’t need to be quite that much in control.

Serves 4

A warm Italian bean salad spiked with rosemary and teamed with lamb chops

Prep: 10 min
Cook: 15 min

2 x 400g cans white beans
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
150ml white wine
2 tbsp mint leaves
8 sprigs rosemary
Sea salt and pepper
12 lamb chops, well trimmed of fat
Extra virgin olive oil
For serving, 1 lemon, quartered



METHOD

Heat the grill. Drain the canned white beans and rinse well. Combine the olive oil, white wine, mint and half the rosemary sprigs in a saucepan, and heat. Add the drained beans, and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes. Add sea salt and pepper to taste.

Brush the lamb chops with a little extra olive oil and grill fiercely and fast until well-marked but still a little pink inside.

Divide the white beans between four pasta plates, and arrange three lamb chops on top. Drizzle with a little extra virgin olive oil, tuck in remaining sprigs of rosemary, and serve with lemon wedges.

jill.dupleix@thetimes.co.uk

Very Simple Food by Jill Dupleix is published by Quadrille at £20. Order from Times Books Direct for £16, plus £1.95 p&p, 0870-160 8080

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