Sometimes, All I Want Is Beans On Toast

Rich food is delicious. Sweet, savoury, buttery, gooey—I like it all, as long as it tastes good. Give me food, glorious food! Feed me until my jeans burst.

Unfortunately, there are too many opportunities during the year for that to happen.

Christmas merges with New Year, which runs into Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, every birthday in the calendar and several occasions someone invented because they fancied going out for dinner. By the time we reach Christmas again, my jeans have gone up a size, and I’ve spent eleven months trying to persuade them to come back down.

It’s a never-ending battle between my appetite and my wardrobe.

Margo is a great cook. She doesn’t simply put food on a plate; she launches culinary projects. Christmas provides the perfect excuse to go to town on something ambitious, complicated and large enough to require structural engineering.

One year, it was Turducken—a roasted chicken inside a roasted duck inside a roasted turkey.

It’s the Russian doll of poultry.

The table was also loaded with crunchy golden potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy and an array of vegetables arranged around the bird as if they were there to make it look healthy. The dinner was to die for.

The dessert nearly killed me.

I’m not complaining. I enjoy an extravagant meal as much as anyone. I’m also happy to try something unusual, although there must be limits. I once wrote about a supposedly fantastic silverbeet, lentil, turmeric and fava bean pizza. I invented the ingredients seconds before writing the title. I’ve never cooked it, eaten it or seen another human being attempt it.

There are some lines even I won’t cross.

But too much rich food for too long does my head in. After several days of roasts, desserts, chocolates, sauces and leftovers reheated in increasingly inventive ways, I begin to crave something plain.

That’s when the humble tin of baked beans starts calling to me.

Beans on toast.

There’s no ceremony involved. No recipe book has to be consulted. No ingredients need to be marinated overnight, folded gently into one another or rested beneath a damp tea towel. Nobody has to reduce anything, drizzle anything or garnish the plate with something that was never intended to be eaten.

Toast the bread. Heat the beans. Put one on the other.

Done.

For several days, I can happily live on beans, toast and water. It resets my taste buds, clears my head and cleans out my insides with an efficiency that probably shouldn’t be discussed on a food blog.

Beans are honest. The label tells you what is in the tin, although perhaps it should also say Warning: Life Contains Nuts. Everything else carries a warning nowadays, so baked beans might as well join in.

Caution: Contents may be hot. Toast may produce crumbs. Excessive consumption may cause your family to request that you open a window.

Simple food also has a way of becoming attached to places and memories. While travelling around Australia, I’ve learned that food and drink often mark the journey as clearly as photographs do.

Margo and I once drove to the Margaret River township expecting to find grapevines lining the riverbanks. We wanted to sample some famous Margaret River wine, only to discover that the wine region is enormous and the vineyards are scattered far beyond the town.

Apparently, wine refuses to arrange itself for the convenience of tourists.

At New Norcia, we learned how the monks once baked bread and produced wine and olive oil. That kind of food makes sense to me. Bread, wine and oil are uncomplicated things. They have been feeding people for centuries without requiring a television competition, a celebrity judge or a smear of sauce dragged artistically across an oversized white plate.

Perhaps that is what I like about beans on toast. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else.

Nobody describes the beans as artisan legumes resting upon a hand-cut bed of flame-kissed wheat. There is no foam, jus, reduction or micro-herb. It doesn’t arrive beneath a silver lid while three waiters stand nearby waiting for you to look impressed.

It’s beans.

On toast.

I’m such an unsophisticated person. I love great food, but I don’t need it every day. Eventually, all the richness becomes too much, and I start dreaming of a tin opener, two slices of toast and a plate that won’t object if I eat from it while wearing yesterday’s clothes.

Beans on toast saves my taste buds.

It saves my sanity.

Most importantly, it saves my jeans.

Beans on toast. Beans on toast. Beans on toast.

–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)