Instant Pot Red Beans and Rice

The tradition of red beans and rice on Mondays in New Orleans is one of the most precise culinary customs in American history, and its origin is entirely practical. Monday was laundry day in the nineteenth-century city — a full day of boiling, scrubbing, wringing, and hanging — and the housewives of the Tremé and the Marigny needed a dish that could cook unattended on the stove all day while they worked. Red kidney beans, purchased dried and soaked overnight, simmered for hours with the ham bone left from Sunday's supper, andouille sausage, the holy trinity of onion, celery, and bell pepper, and Creole spices that the city's complex history had assembled from French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean sources. The dish required no attention. It rewarded time. By evening, the beans had broken down at their edges into a thick, creamy gravy that coated the rice — long-grain white rice cooked separately, as New Orleans has always insisted — with a richness that no other cooking method produces. Louis Armstrong signed his letters Red Beans and Ricely Yours. The Instant Pot compresses eight hours of simmering into forty-five minutes of pressure, producing the same broken-down, creamy-gravied result in a fraction of the time. Monday or not.