Just when you think you know a particular dish, it goes and surprises you. Or it surprises me, anyway.
Red beans & rice: yeah, I kinda went crazy with the onions.
Red beans and rice have long been a standard of Southern tables, particularly in Louisiana, and throughout Latin America, too. Historically, in Louisiana’s Creole culture it was the Monday standard, the washing day meal, with the weekend’s ham bone thrown into a pot of beans to enrich the dish. To me it’s as familiar a combination as peanut butter and jelly.
fried sesame mochi ball: fork-free enjoyment of red beans & rice!
But when we first became acquainted with Chinese bakeries, Himself and I discovered that red beans and rice make a great dessert, too. Mochi is a sweet snack available throughout Asia, made of glutinous rice that has been pounded into a paste, formed into a ball, filled with another paste, this one made of sweetened azuki beans, and then either fried or steamed. It’s not something to make a steady diet of, but whenever we’re in Chinatown–any Chinatown–we always have to stop in at a bakery and have one or two.
butter mochi cake
Lately our friend John has been turning us on to dishes he grew up with in Japan. In the process, we’ve learned more about the possibilities of red beans and rice than we ever imagined. For my recent birthday, he made mochi cake for me. In a nod to the Western half of his makeup, it was a butter mochi cake (the butter is omitted in Asia).
Mochi cake doesn't take much more than this.
Oh yes, it’s rich and wonderful. A small piece will do, which is okay, for this is a treat to savor. The rice flour dough has an appealing chewiness to it. Dotted throughout it are pockets of red bean paste that provide a rich, sweet mooshiness as a counterpoint to the jaw-exercising quality of the rice dough. It’s lovely freshly made, and it holds up well while you work your way through it, so you can spend several days noshing on it without it going bad on you.
Lest you think the idea of beans and rice for dessert is too peculiar to entertain, it helps to keep in mind that this sort of thing is cultural, that is, a preference that is learned, not inborn. If you don’t like it after you’ve sampled it, that’s just fine. But as they say, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it!
Butter-Mochi Cake
Preheat your oven to 350°F. Coat a 9″ x 13″ baking pan with butter and it set aside.
In a large mixing bowl combine 1/2 cup (1 stick) of melted, unsalted butter (not margarine!), 1 1/4 cups of granulated sugar, 3 eggs, 1 teaspoon of pure vanilla extract and 3 cups of milk and mix well. (You can do this by hand–you don’t really need an electric mixer to make this cake.) Sift together 3 cups of rice flour and 1 teaspoon of baking powder and then stir this dry mixture into the wet mixture.
Pour this mixture into your prepared pan. Then dot the batter all over with blobs of red bean paste, about a teaspoon in size. I use a package of paste that’s in the vicinity of 18 ounces (by weight). It may look like too much paste for the one cake, but it isn’t, so use it all!
Pop this concoction into the oven and bake it for about 70 minutes, or until it springs back when you touch it. It will be lightly crackly and golden on top. This cake retains heat like a fiend, so let it cool a bit before you dig in.
If you balk at the idea of eating sweetened beans, you can make this cake without the bean paste and serve it with fresh fruit. But it’s your loss!
