Pork Chops and Beans

New Year's Eve 2028. And I am sitting in my kitchen at nine p.m. — earlier every year, because the years are teaching me that the clock doesn't matter, only the cooking matters, and the cooking is done, and the year is finished, and the journal is full. Volume thirty. Thirty journals. Thirty spiral-bound notebooks from Dollar General, filled with recipes and moments and the handwriting of a woman whose hands shake more every year but whose words don't.

The 2028 list: Pearl turned one with Hattie Pearl's smile. Andre married Tiffany by the river. The newspaper put me on the front page. The Lowcountry boil fed two hundred and sixty. Gladys hit nine. The watermelon grew for the fourth year. Michael sat at the table with a fork. Pearl walked. Earl Jr. stayed cancer-free. Ruthie Mae stayed alive. The garden produced. The skillet cooked. The chair was set. The right knee started talking.

The right knee. I haven't written about it in the blog because writing about it makes it real, and real means doctors and surgeries and walkers and months away from the stove, and I am not ready for that conversation with the world. I am barely ready for that conversation with myself. But the knee is there, and the conversation is coming, and 2029 will be the year I have the second surgery, because the right knee will not wait, and Dorothy Henderson does not wait for things that are inevitable — she meets them. She met Earl's death. She met the diabetes. She met the left knee. She will meet the right knee.

But tonight is not about the knee. Tonight is about the year that's ending and the year that's starting and the black-eyed peas on the stove and the brown rice in the pot and the tradition that survives the diagnosis and the aging and the talking knees and the thirty journals and the seventy-three years. The tradition survives everything. The tradition is the black-eyed peas. The tradition is the table. The tradition is sitting in a kitchen at nine p.m. on the last night of the year and writing down what happened and what mattered and what was cooked and who was fed and who was lost and who was found and who is still here.

I am still here.

Happy New Year, baby.

Now go on and feed somebody.

The black-eyed peas are the tradition, but the pork is the backbone — and on a night when I’m sitting here with a knee that has opinions and a journal that’s run out of pages, I want something that sticks to your ribs and tells you that you made it through. Pork and beans on New Year’s Eve is old as my mother and her mother before her, and when Andre and Tiffany and the babies and all the rest of them come through that door tomorrow, this is what’s waiting. You feed them beans for luck, and you give them pork because they earned it, and you don’t explain any further than that.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 1 hour 15 minutes | Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

6 bone-in pork chops (about 3/4 inch thick)
2 cans (15 oz each) navy beans or Great Northern beans, drained and rinsed
1 can (15 oz) black-eyed peas, drained and rinsed
1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained
1 medium yellow onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped (for garnish)

Instructions

Season the chops. Pat pork chops dry with paper towels. Season both sides with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika.
Sear the pork. Heat oil in a large, deep skillet or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Sear chops 3—4 minutes per side until golden brown. Remove and set aside; do not discard drippings.
Build the base. Reduce heat to medium. Add onion to the same pan and cook in the drippings until softened, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook 1 minute more until fragrant.
Add the beans. Stir in navy beans, black-eyed peas, diced tomatoes, chicken broth, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, and dry mustard. Scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan.
Return the pork. Nestle the seared pork chops back into the bean mixture, pressing them down slightly so they are partially submerged. The beans should come up around the sides of each chop.
Simmer low and slow. Cover and reduce heat to low. Cook 45—55 minutes, until the pork chops are tender and cooked through (internal temperature of 145°F) and the beans have thickened and absorbed the flavors. Stir gently every 15 minutes and add a splash of broth if the mixture gets too thick.
Rest and finish. Remove from heat and let rest, covered, for 5 minutes. Taste the beans and adjust salt and pepper as needed. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve directly from the pan over rice or with cornbread alongside.

Nutrition (per serving)

Pork Chops and Beans — Because the Table Doesn’t Ask How Your Knee Feels