Moros y Cristianos

The name ("Moors and Christians") is a Spanish jest: from the 8th century, Muslim Moors ruled the Iberian Peninsula for centuries until the Christian kingdoms drove them out by the 15th — the long campaign Spaniards call the Reconquista. Cubans read the pot the same way: the black beans are the Moors, the white rice the Christians. The name is generally said to have taken hold in 19th-century Havana for the western, black-bean version. The one-pot rice-and-beans technique is often credited to African-Cuban cooks, but its exact origin is unsettled — the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz called the African ancestry of such dishes possible but unproven, so it shouldn't be stated as fact. What is clear is that black beans reached the Caribbean through Spanish colonization, and the practice of cooking rice and beans together in the bean broth was crystallized on the Cuban stove.

Spanish jest, African technique. The name is 16th–17th century Iberian — black beans for Moors, white rice for Christians — but cooking rice in bean broth in one pot is West African. The starch in that broth coats each grain into a slightly waxy body and dyes it through; cook them apart and you've just got beans-on-rice.

Black beans and white rice cooked together in one pot with the bean broth — rice ends up gray-brown, fragrant with bay, oregano, cumin, and a sofrito of onion, garlic, green pepper. The grains stay separate but stained. Different from "black beans and rice" served side by side: this is one dish, one cooking, one flavor. Served plain or under a piece of stewed pork.

Cooking the rice in the bean broth (rather than water) is what makes this not just "beans on rice." The starch from the beans coats each grain, giving the rice a slightly waxy, fragrant body, and the dark broth dyes it through. Cooking the beans separately first to a near-tender stage matters — adding raw beans to the pot would either undercook them or overcook the rice.