It wouldn’t be red beans and rice without sage, but anything more than a pinch (for three servings) and it goes from “aroma” to “perfume” real quick. In excess, it tastes like Irish Spring soap or something.
Liquid smoke. All you need is a dash to flavor an entire stew, and all you need is slightly more than a dash to make that same stew taste like grandma’s ashtray.
I’ve always enjoyed an extra dash of Angostura bitters in my cocktails. But this seems like way too much of a good thing: “The bitters shot”
Huh. I’ve never tried sage in my red beans and rice. I’ll have to next time. Usually I put a bit of thyme in it.
Too much thyme can kill a dish as well!
I guess I’ve never gotten to that point! 
Is it any wonder I’m not a criminal
Is it any wonder I’m not in jail
Too much thyme on my hands… I’ve got too much thyme on my hands…
Well, I’m no expert. I just decided to start making it one day and looked online for examples that seemed authentic. Most seemed to coincide in sage and other ingredients, and that’s what I do. It’s the only thing I use sage for. Here’s my recipe:
(Makes two or three servings)
Dry red beans soaked overnight 12 hours
Half onion
Half green bell pepper (red’s also good but a bit sweet)
One garlic clove
One celery stalk
Small bunch of flat-leaf parsley
One bay leaf
Quarter teaspoon sage
Third teaspoon each of spicy paprika, thyme, oregano and garlic powder
Half teaspoon of smoked/sweet paprika
Sausage in slices
Soak beans overnight for up to 12 hours, drain and rinse well. Remove toughest stringy fibers from celery with knife and peel bell pepper with potato peeler. Chop onion, garlic, bell pepper and celery and sauté in olive oil with a little salt and bay leaf. Add beans, water, parsley and spices. Once boiling, reduce heat, cook with lid for about 90 minutes and check beans. Once tender, add salt and sausage in slices and cook for another five minutes. Make rice separately and serve side-by-side with beans.
I always forget to add one of the ingredients and have to check the recipe before settling in for the cooking time. The way to remember is “six vegetables and six spices.”
Feel free to disagree with any of the above. It’s a hoot for me to be telling you this, because I’ve gotten a lot of cooking tips and recipes from you here on the SDMB.
It’s usually cumin. People go crazy with it.
Can’t have too much cumin for me… 
I use the one on Gumbo Pages (an excellent resource for authentic Cajun and Creole recipes) (I don’t disagree with your recipe at all):
https://www.gumbopages.com/food/red-beans.html
They use thyme, but sage goes really well with beans. At a quarter teaspoon, though, I’m surprised you can taste it. I usually like my sage a bit more forward than that, though I tend to use fresh (as I have a giant sage bush in the back). For a 15-oz can (or dried equivalent) of beans, I’ll use a teaspoon or so of fresh sage. The other herbs that go really well with beans are thyme and savory (so much so that savory is sometimes called “the bean herb.”) Oh, and epazote, if you’re cooking Mexican and enjoy its earthy taste. Sage I use quite a bit as sage butter for ravioli and for pork dishes. For a pound of breakfast pork sausage, for example, I’ll use about two teaspoons of fresh sage leaves. Also, in stuffing. The McCormick recipe for sage stuffing uses 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground sage for 8 oz of dried bread cubes.
It’s just a matter of taste – I have experienced “too much sage,” though, and I know exactly what you’re talking about in terms of it being a complementary spice and overwhelming a dish.
Yeah, I love cumin, too. I cook a good deal of Indian and Middle Eastern type dishes where cumin is often the predominant spice.
One of my professors used to say that the four key ingredients for chili are too much garlic, too much onion, too much cumin, and too much peppers.
Hey, that’s the recipe I started with and the one that led me to that website for the first time, and I think I got the idea from you… And it doesn’t include sage. I must have seen it somewhere else, but that’s the recipe I was going to check (and didn’t) before my last post. Yeah, I use just a pinch in the palm of my hand and grind it up with my fingers, and I can taste it plenty. I guess I’m still reluctant after overdoing it!
" Once, for example, when I was just starting out in the food business, I was hired by the caper people to develop a lot of recipes using capers, and it was weeks of tossing capers into just about everything but milkshakes before I came to terms with the fact that nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it." -Nora Ephron
Yeah, the Serious Eats recipe that I just checked uses sage, as well (though a teaspoon ground for a pound of beans.) And I found some others that use it and some that don’t (like Emeril LaGasse’s, which just uses thyme and bay leaves). I just never thought of it as being central to red beans and rice. I’ll have to try it next time as, like I said, I like the combo of beans and sage and pork.
For me, that would be Neem leaves (fresh tender light green ones). Eggplant cubes and neem leaves are stir fried to make bitters, a dish that is traditionally eaten before appetizers in Eastern India during summers.
You only eat like a tablespoon of this; and the neem leaves need be very little in quantity and very tender in quality (I grow my own neem plant).
Individually the words make sense. Just not together.
Celery seed- easy with that stuff now.
I like the spice in general, but I find people use too much cumin in food. The worst “offenders” are people making or using shitty taco seasoning.