Varieties

• There are thousands of varieties of beans grown around the world. The more common kinds traditionally used in American cuisine are kidney, navy, Great Northern, pinto, chickpeas or garbanzos, cranberry and lima beans. These appear most often in chile con carne, bean soup and traditional baked beans. The spreading of nouvelle cuisine to the U.S. has introduced more exotic varieties, such as gigantes, black beans and cannellinis, to contemporary cooks.

Entrees

• Beyond the familiar baked beans and beans with franks, contemporary cooks now prepare a wide variety of casserole-type dishes originating elsewhere. Cassoulet, a French casserole of white beans and vegetables studded with duck, goose, pork, lamb or sausages, and oven-simmered for hours in a round clay pot, was among the first of the international dishes to appear. A Spanish version, featuring gigante or large lima beans and spicy chorizo sausage, is one example of baked beans' modern evolution. Indian cuisine offers oven-baked stews of chickpeas combined with other vegetables, meats and seasonings.

Side Dishes

• No longer relegated to the status of an also-ran on salad bars in America, the chickpea or garbanzo bean received a boost in popularity as more people began sampling Middle Eastern dishes such as hummus. They may not have encountered the use of chickpeas in Indian dishes such as chana masala, a vegetable stew from northern India. Americans are even less likely to have eaten chickpea crepes with cilantro, green chilis and ginger. American Southwestern cuisine has contributed to nouvelle cuisine as well, offering such dishe as poblano chile peppers stuffed with black beans and then baked.

Desserts

• Some of the more startling nouvelle cuisine developments are desserts that include beans as ingredients. A coconut Bundt cake that includes pureed canned cannellini beans is only one example of the meeting of an American dessert with Mediterranean cannellini beans and tropical coconut. Black beans have found their way into dessert baking as an ingredient in a brownie recipe. Navy beans made their way from the bean soup pot to a brulee tart, a twist on a bean pie recipe associated with American Muslim cuisine.