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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I grew up in a terracotta house with bottle-green windows in a leafy neighbourhood along the Nile in Cairo. There was a giant pomegranate tree right outside the door that would burst with little ruby-red crowns each year. Every Friday, I would go to the farmers’ market with my father. I knew the sight of the red on the pomegranate tree meant that the beans you should shell were coming into season.
To this day, when I see a pomegranate, I think of shelling beans. I think these types of observations and connections may have led to my fascination with produce. I am known to have borderline obsessive phases with an ingredient or dish. It started when I was young. I would become fixated on an ingredient, and make it all the ways I could think of, until I landed on a way I believed worked best, and then would make that version obsessively. These phases sometimes last years. Imagine what fun it is to live with me, after the 48th day of . . . beans. I remember a baklava phase when I was in college, followed by roast chicken, potatoes, Spanish tortilla, beans . . . All of this laid the foundation for the rationale of this column – throwing a dinner party to celebrate an imaginary holiday, based on a single thing. I am most drawn to the humble foodstuffs. Potatoes, beans, radish – they are the jewels of the earth, and I think they are very worthy of celebration.
Today, I keep a sizeable collection of the most beautiful dry shelling beans – more than 50 varieties, including scarlet runner, tiger’s eye, sorana and many, many more. Often when I travel, I come back with a few souvenirs to add to the collection, which lives in a cupboard at my studio where I can take it out when working on creative projects. I’ve referenced a specific red found in cranberry beans more than once. And with my homeware brand Gohar World, we’ve made plates with beans painted on them. A few months ago a friend, Melissa Morris, the founder of luxury handbag label Métier, and I met for a coffee and discussed, among many other things, our shared obsessions. Melissa makes beautiful, quality leather goods that are produced in Italy. That day, we had the idea of making a few items together with beans as a central theme.
Working with my sister and co-founder Nadia, we took out my trusty archive and started working on illustrations that could be handpainted directly on leather envelopes. With that, our Métier x Gohar World bean collection was born.
To celebrate, we decided to throw a bean party at my Tribeca studio in New York. I put together a menu with several courses: imbrecciata (an Italian bean and grain stew), simple braised sorana beans and a celery salad with soldier beans. Plus some other things, such as a simple green salad, tuna fillets poached in olive oil, and a rich chocolate cake. Since I had a lot of responsibilities that night – we invited around 40 friends who worked in fashion – I called on my friend, New York-based chef Feisal Lagos, for all the braising. For flowers, I also phoned my friend Kinga Mojsa, and asked if she could help with a few arrangements. We ended up going back to the bean archive, where it all started, and making centrepieces using beautiful calla lilies and the beans themselves. So there you have it, a fashion dinner and beans can exist in the same sentence.
