Cuban Beans and Rice

Ingredients
1 lb black beans
1/2 c olive oil
1 c chopped onion
1 green pepper, chopped
1 clove garlic
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 smoked ham hock, about 1 lb
1/4 c red vinegar
4 c cooked rice
3 hard-cooked eggs, cut into wedges
1 red onion, sliced into rings

Method
Wash beans, cover with 6 c water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil..
Cook onions, green pepper and garlic in olive oil for 5 minutes. Add to beans along with salt, pepper, ham hock and vinegar. Return to boil, lower heat, cover and simmer until beans are almost soft, 1 to 2 hours (depends on age of beans). Remove ham hock, continue cooking beans until tender. Remove the meat from the bone and shred. Return to pot. Serve beans over hot rice and garnish with egg wedges and raw onion rings. Makes 8 servings.

Source
Clipped from newspaper. Probably sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s.

Comments

• Nowadays you can google up a hundred recipes for Cuban black beans and compare them and choose the one you like the best, or the most authentic. I collected this long ago in the pre-internet era, when my sources of “exotic ethnic” recipes were few.
• A quick search of  Cuban black bean recipes shows many versions which add a couple of bay leaves, some cumin, and a teaspoon of sugar, and omit the ham and eggs.
• I wouldn’t make it with so much oil nowadays!
• What’s with the “red vinegar”? Red wine vinegar?
• If you wanted, you could make this vegetarian by leaving out the ham (and adding a few drops of smoke flavouring), or vegan by also leaving out the eggs.