The Best Baked Beans

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Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Monday, May 11, 2020

The Best Baked Beans

Sam Sifton

Good morning. With the assistance of his young student Titian, Giovanni Bellini made a painting in 1514, “The Feast of the Gods.” It’s terrific and someday maybe you’ll see it for real at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. They’re all there: Mercury, Jupiter, Cybele, Pan, Neptune, the whole gang. Everyone’s drinking wine, eating, hanging out, and even if creepy Priapus is about to try to grope a sleeping Lotis (in the story, he fails and everyone laughs at him), it’s still a nice image of what it’s like, what it was like, to gather a lot of people together to celebrate nothing in particular. Someday, some way, we may do that again.

In the meantime, though, it’s back to beans and rice, beans and tortillas, beans and chips, maybe this week Ali Slagle’s cheesy spicy black bean bake (above), to which I recently added chopped crisp bacon, to great effect. That is a nice dinner, with rice and chips, lime wedges, hot sauce. I serve it with crema, too.

You could make a quick-pickled vegetable salad tonight. I like this maple and miso sheet-pan salmon with green beans. (The leftovers make for a lovely lunchtime salad the next day.) Spicy glass noodles with shiitakes and cabbage? You might be cooking for only one or two, but they’ll satisfy the feasting dreams, absolutely.

A meatloaf would be nice to have this week, if only for the sandwiches you can make with it on subsequent days. So would this pimento cheese (for your meatloaf sandwich!). You could make a crab croque-madame, perhaps. Or, if you happen across some strawberries, a strawberry fool or that great taste of spring, a strawberry shortcake.

Thousands and thousands more ideas for what to cook this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Like, for instance, this amazing Toni Tipton-Martin jam, for pork chops in lemon-caper sauce. Many more than usual are free to use even if you aren’t yet a subscriber to our site and apps. (I hope you will consider subscribing all the same. Subscriptions support our work and allow us to offer instruction along with the recipes. For instance, here’s everything you need to know about how to make rice.)

Please visit us on Facebook, where we have a lively community group going, and look at our beautiful photographs on Instagram. We’re on YouTube and Twitter, too. And if you run into trouble with any of it, please write for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We will get back to you.

Now, it’s nothing to do with French-pressed coffee or Irish bangers and mash, but you might try using Google Earth one of these days to take a virtual trip. I went to Moncton the other day, one of the three big cities in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. I’d never been! It’s basically the transportation hub of the Canadian Maritimes — a shipbuilding town that became a railway town that became a commercial city, set on a bow in the Petitcodiac River where the tide rolls past on a bore that, occasionally, rises to a height where people can surf, right through the metropolis. Check out the Free Meeting House!

What a joy to read our Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Val Kilmer.

Finally, Liza Donnelly, the visual journalist and New Yorker cartoonist, has been drawing live on the internet, and it’s magical to watch. Do that, and I’ll be back on Wednesday with not just one, but two newsletters. This one, as usual, and a new one, At Home, that offers our best suggestions for how to live a full and cultured life during this pandemic, at home. Won’t you sign up for it? Thanks!