Black Eyed Pea Stew

The Rancho Gordo Kitchen (2017)

“Our sales continued to grow, and we were reaching more stores. We have never hired a publicist, but reporters still came. Writers and reporters liked discovering us on their own rather than through press releases. The Washington Post was the first big one. Food & Wine did a terrific article pairing us with San Francisco chef Laurence Jossel of Nopa. We were featured in Gourmet magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and maybe my favorite, a twelve-page article in The New Yorker. Each article added another level of awareness for the beans and allowed us to grow naturally.

I don’t want to overstate our importance in the long history of beans, but I will say that I’m glad we found each other. It’s been a great, happy relationship.” — Steve Sando in The Bean Book (2024)

Steve Sando, the founder of Rancho Gordo, admits in the introduction to his 2024 The Bean Book that he’s “a better evangelist than a grower.” He was able to turn a humble, cheap food (the subject of flatulence rumors and crude schoolyard chants) into a status symbol. I don’t know anything about business, but I can tell you that this guy is a marketing genius. He recognized that beans were undervalued because the quality of the available product (canned, frozen, or dying a slow death on the drygoods shelf) was terrible. And people didn’t know how bad it was. So he showed everybody (and by everybody, I mean people who shop at the San Francisco Ferry Building and read food magazines) how good beans can be.

He also understood that superior taste was only a small part of what made his product so enticing. Dried beans are naturally photogenic. They come in a variety of colors and sizes and shapes. They have fun names like Scarlett Runner and Rio Zape and (before it was quietly changed to “Buckeye”) Yellow Indian Woman. And though they seem like a luxury, many times more expensive than the pintos at Vons, they’re still only about $7 a pound. So every bean lover, regardless of socioeconomic class, can regularly enjoy the top-of-the-line best beans money can buy. What other category of food is as egalitarian?

my latest haul

I also have to give a shout-out to the mascot, the Rancho Gordo Bean Lady who graces most of their packaging. She’s retro, with shaped eyebrows and mid-century shellacked hair. She grazes her tongue to her teeth in a saucy pseudo-provocation. It’s the type of sexuality one encounters at the independent greeting card store or the Provincetown trinket shop. She exists in the lineage of attractive female food mascots like the Chiquita Banana Lady, the Land o Lakes Butter Lady, and the Sunmaid Raisin Lady. But, unlike those 20th-century images, Miss Rancho Gordo is decidedly gringa. Sando emphasizes his beans’ status as an indigenous crop, linking their history to California, to Mexico, and to whatever this land was called before whitey got here. But he’s also careful not to exoticize the beans or his company in a way that seems icky to contemporary lib sensibilities. The name “Rancho Gordo” is obviously Spanish, but Sando never talks about his own heritage. Sando could be a Spanish name, but he keeps his 23andMe close to the vest. (I looked — the ethnically ambiguous dude never mentions if he’s Mexican or not.) I wonder, if Rancho Gordo started in 2021 rather than 2001, he wouldn’t be accused in some quarters of appropriation, of profiting off of food he has no right to claim as his own.

¿es latino?

I probably first learned about Rancho Gordo beans from one of those Gourmet or Bon Appetit articles around 2009. I remember seeing them popping up on menus and in a few gourmet shops when I lived in New York. I don’t recall ever seeing Rancho Gordo at the Ferry Building during this period, but I was more into Boccalone’s Meat Cones (alas, another life). According to my email records, I first ordered the beans (Garbanzos, Ayocote Morado, Lila, Brown Tepary, Mayocoba) in September 2016 and reupped in May 2017 (Good Mother Stallard, Alubia Blanca, Yellow Indian Woman, Super Lucky 2017 Black Eyed Pea, Santa Maria Pinquito.) I got one more big order in 2017 before officially joining the Rancho Gordo Bean Club on April 18, 2018. Why, then, do you ask? Well, you might remember “bean fever” was at an all-time high due to the recent publication of a gushing 7700-word profile of Sando by Burkhard Bilger (what a name!) in The New Yorker. Persuadable as ever, I impulsively decided to take the plunge before the Bean Club waitlist became interminable. Months later, after realizing I couldn’t eat that many beans, I canceled my membership. I almost instantly regretted it, getting on the waitlist again and futilely waiting (over half a decade) for my proverbial number to be called.

In the years since The New Yorker article (genius targeted advertising to Sando’s exact, insufferable audience) blew up Rancho Gordo’s profile, his beans have gotten even more popular. The early pandemic grocery shortage elevated all pantry goods to prize possessions, and the proliferation of shoppy-shops (a term coined by Emily Sundberg in GrubStreet in 2023) made them accessible in all of the most annoying neighborhoods, nationwide. Shoppy-shops wouldn’t exist without products to stocky-stock (shoot me), and by 2023 there were “Rancho Gordos” in many formerly niche, perpetually dull categories. Let’s all recite them together: Anson Mills grains, Graza olive oil, Fishwife tinned fish, Fly By motherfucking Jing. None of these abominations would have happened if not for Steve Sando and Rancho Gordo. For better or for worse (and I would, regrettably, argue for… better), we have him to thank.

The Bean Book, published in 2024, is actually not the first cookbook attributed to Steve Sando and Rancho Gordo. A now out-of-print small press Rancho Gordo paperback came out in 2008, followed by two vegetarian-focused volumes in 2017 and 2012. But this is the glossiest tome, the first one on the front table at Barnes and Noble. I planned to cook my recently acquired Super Lucky 2025 Black Eyed Peas using whatever BEP recipe was in the book. Of course there’s not even one, so I had to go through the vault to find a Steve Sando Black Eyed Pea Stew from 2017. It all works out, because Rancho Gordo feels more like a 2017 phenomenon anyway.

If you click through to the original recipe, you’ll see that the first ingredient is bacon. That might have worked for 2017 Boccalone’s meat cone Bryan, but now in 2025 I must make some substitutions. And, sorry, but every time I hear “Black Eyed Peas,” I can only think of one musical melody, one naughty lyrical phrase warbled by Miss Stacy Ferguson herself. Like our dear departed Yellow Indian Woman, it’s been neutered, white-washed into the anodyne, meaningless “Let’s Get It Started.” But, if you were around when we bombed Iraq or subscribe to Planet Heather (the only funny podcast), you’ll know what to sing guiltily under your breath. So here’s my recipe for vegetarian (but still smoky) black eyed peas inspired by Rancho Gordo, yuppie marketing triumphs, and words we no longer say.

“Let’s Get [Redacted]” Vegetarian Black-Eyed Pea Stew

Ingredients