black bean
Cultural layer
Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Gastronomía Mexicana (Ricardo Muñoz Zurita, 2012)
Phaseolus vulgaris L. (Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, accessed 2026-10-11)
La milpa (CONABIO, Biodiversidad Mexicana, accessed 2026-10-11)
José Alejandro Almaguer González, Hernán José García Ramírez, Vicente Vargas Vite and Mauricio Padilla Mirazo, La Dieta de la Milpa: modelo de alimentación mesoamericana saludable y culturalmente pertinente (Secretaría de Salud, 2020)
Route
PendingThe routes are written. They are not yet mapped.
This entry's cultural layer already names where it came from and how it moved. What it does not yet carry is that movement as structure: ordered waypoints with real coordinates, and a mechanism on each leg. Until it does, the layer stays an empty slot rather than a drawn line, because a map built from prose would be a guess with a projection under it.
1 of 409 entries carries a mapped route · nutmeg is the prototype
- Waypoints
Ordered places, each with its kind
- Coordinates
Real positions, with the gazetteer they came from
- Segments
From, to, and the mechanism that moved it
- Confidence
Documented, attributed or contested
- Summary
What the route argues, in a sentence
Names · co-equal, marked by how each one travelled
FoodwayPresent as a living food culture.
No names recorded.
Connections
12 bonds · 10 sourcedFrijoles de la olla.
Read in Los clasicos de la cocina mexicana, page 42, two leafy branches of epazote in the pot, and page viii, where the book says the herb most used with beans is epazote; the cited Diccionario Enciclopedico was not the book in hand.
Frijoles.
Read in Los clasicos de la cocina mexicana, page 19, the beans, the cumin and the chipotle mashed together for the chimichangas; the cited Diccionario Enciclopedico was not the book in hand.
Finished over frijoles.
Read in Los clasicos de la cocina mexicana, page 44, four limes halved among the garnishes for the frijoles charros; the cited Diccionario Enciclopedico was not the book in hand.
Frijoles.
Read in Los clasicos de la cocina mexicana, page 19, the refried beans for chimichangas mixed with cumin and chipotle. The book writes frijoles without naming the variety; the cited Diccionario Enciclopedico was not the book in hand.
Beans served with plenty of manioc flour.
Relocated in Historia da Alimentacao no Brasil, volume 1: pages 233 and 235. Cascudo describes farinha with beans rather than farofa scattered over feijoada.
Frijoles and garnish.
Read in Los clasicos de la cocina mexicana, page 44, the coriander added just before the beans are served, and page viii, where coriander or parsley may stand in for the epazote; the cited Diccionario Enciclopedico was not the book in hand.
The Three Sisters dishes, black turtle beans among the beans, and black bean and yucca soup with hominy.
Maize protein is limiting in lysine and tryptophan; legume protein is limiting in methionine. Each covers the other's gap, so the pair gives an amino acid balance neither reaches alone. The milpa is that arithmetic, planted, several thousand years before anyone could write it down.
Maize in human nutrition: improvement of maize diets (Food and Agriculture Organization, accessed 2026-09-13) · The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (Sean Sherman, 2017)
Read in Sherman's The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, 2017, page 14, Three Sisters summertime salad, and page 43, Three Sisters mash: summer squash and corn with a cup of cedar-braised beans, pages 36 to 37, a mix of heirloom Arikara, Hidatsa Shield and black turtle beans. Also page 74, black bean and yucca soup with warming spices, black beans with hominy in corn stock. Sherman's Three Sisters are his own nations' and his neighbours', not the Mesoamerican milpa.
Refried black beans served with fried ripe plantains.
Relocated in Gran Cocina Latina: Guatemalan molded refried black beans, page 274, served with fried ripe plantains and ripened cream. Her moros y cristianos, page 310, has no plantain.
Frijoles de la olla.
Read in Los clasicos de la cocina mexicana, page 42, the beans, onion, garlic, lard, water and epazote going into the pot together; the cited Diccionario Enciclopedico was not the book in hand.
Three Sisters.
Agronomic, and the agronomy is a nitrogen budget. Rhizobium bacteria in nodules on the bean's roots fix atmospheric nitrogen into a form all three plants draw on. The corn stands first and is strong enough to carry the climbing bean. The squash runs along the ground and shades out competition, its bristly leaves keeping pests off. The three together yield more than any of them grown alone, which is why they are planted as one system and eaten as one. The pairing on the plate follows the pairing in the field by several thousand years.
Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013) · The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (Sean Sherman, 2017)
Read in Sherman's The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen, 2017, page 14, Three Sisters summertime salad, and page 43, Three Sisters mash: summer squash and corn with a cup of cedar-braised beans, pages 36 to 37, a mix of heirloom Arikara, Hidatsa Shield and black turtle beans.
Bonds are drawn from culinary literature and origin-tradition references, tiered by source. Origin means a reference from the place. Witness means the pairing is the place's own and the reference documenting it was written from outside.
The score is cultural weight: how central a pairing is in the tradition that documents it. It is not a prediction of how two materials behave in a formulation and not a measure of chemical affinity. The scale is ordinal, because centrality is a judgement rather than a measurement: 1.0 where the pair is the dish, 0.9 a fixed named form, 0.8 a canonical dish, 0.7 recurrent across many dishes, 0.6 common, 0.5 attested, 0.4 marginal or compound-led.
Each score is set against a named dish and carries that dish in its note. Where a score has not been examined it says so, because an inherited figure and a researched one should not look alike.
The dish is named by a reader who knows the cuisine and cites a source appropriate to it. It has not yet been confirmed inside that source page by page, so a note records what supports a score rather than what has been checked in the book.
Studio Culinar-E, "black bean", Pantry Archive, Studio Monk-E, 2026. https://studioculinar-e.com/archive/black-bean
/archive/black-bean
Bonds are tiered by source, origin-tradition references first.