Baked Beans and Brown Bread

Baked beans and brown bread are a part of me.  My entire family hails from the great State of Maine and almost all of them still live there.  Mainers don’t leave the state much, or at all,  because the rest of the world isn’t Maine.  It may as well be another country.  My parents moved to Connecticut before I was born in search of work so that is where I was raised but Summers and holidays were all spent in Maine.  My roots are there.  Baked beans are in my blood.  

As a boy I participated in apple picking, haying, chicken farming, maple taps and syrup boils and Maine Bean Hole Bean suppers.  Dig a pit, build a fire, let it burn to coals, put in the beans, cover them over with hot coals and dirt and come back tomorrow for the finest bean dish in the world.  At least to my way of thinking.

Saturday night bean suppers are a tradition in Maine.  Brown bread has been mostly overshadowed by hotdogs (odd looking neon red dogs found only in Maine as far as I know) but for me brown bread is where its at.  Almost every household has a bean pot and everybody knows bean pots make the best beans if you’re not cooking in a hole.  It’s narrow neck and wide shoulder minimize evaporation and there’s just something about the ceramic or glazed clay that works magic.

A Bit of History
In the beginning, there were beans. Traditional Native American cuisine consisted of corn, beans and squash. These three foods play a vital role in defining modern American cuisine. We find grits, cornbread, and red beans and rice in the South, tortillas and pinto beans in the Southwest, baked beans and succotash in the Northeast, and pumpkin pie across the continent. English settlers in the Northeast brought a culinary tradition with them that was then blended with local foods such as turkey, maple syrup, lobster, clams, cranberries, corn and beans to provide Indian pudding, Boston baked beans and brown bread, clam chowder and boiled lobster.

Maine Native people today still make a traditional bean and corn dish known as hull corn soup. Corn which has been soaked in ashes and water and had the skin removed is added to yellow-eye beans and sometimes bits of meat. Water is added and the mixture is cooked into a hearty soup. In years gone by, Natives also baked beans with maple syrup and bear fat in ceramic pots in the ground. Englanders adapted their own versions of the corn soup (succotash) and the baked beans.

Across New England, and certainly throughout Maine, a tradition of baked bean suppers takes place in community institutions such as churches, granges, and firehouses. The tradition of baked beans for Saturday night supper seems to have originated with the pilgrims, who would cook enough so that they would not have to cook on the Sabbath. The eating of beans extends to Sunday morning as well, and many Mainers speak of eating beans for Sunday morning breakfast. Today, bean suppers are often used as fundraisers. For example, the Caribou Lions Club holds three or four bean-hole bean suppers annually to raise money for their service organization.

While Boston is known as bean-town, only in Maine can you ever really get to know beans. B&M (Burnham and Morrill) baked beans of Portland still bakes beans in huge iron pots in brick ovens before they can them for distribution around the country. The Kennebec Bean Company in North Vassalboro packages a range of Maine-grown beans under the “State of Maine” label and also sells many of them prepared to an old Maine lumber camp formula. They cook varieties of beans only known in Maine. There are other, smaller canning companies who can traditional Maine beans as well.

- From the  University of Maine

History of Bean-hole Beans

Many America foods originated in America and were passed on to early settlers by Native Americans. It is difficult to imagine a meal without Native American foods–corn, potatoes, squash, and beans, of course, but also peanuts, pumpkins, pineapple, tomatoes, cocoa, and avocados. These American foods were adopted and transformed by immigrant communities, who added their own traditions, recipes and ingredients to the melting pot. Regional foods developed using available resources. In New England, clam and fish chowders made with milk and baked beans are as ubiquitous as black-eyed peas and fried chicken in the south.

The bean was an integral part of the Native American diet. Often called the “poor man’s meat” beans are rich in protein, supplying a third of the essential amino acids to the corn, bean and squash trinity. In the northeast, Boston would not be called “Bean-town” if it weren’t for the beans adopted from the Native American custom of cooking beans and maple syrup with bits of venison or fish and corn.

New Englanders replaced the maple syrup with molasses and salt pork replaced other meats, and Boston baked beans became the Saturday night staple for most New Englanders. These might be served with brown bread (a steamed bread made with wheat flour, molasses and sometimes raisins), biscuits or corn bread. Later, hot dogs or frankfurters were added. Beans could cook all day Saturday and be eaten Saturday night, then simply reheated on Sunday so as to allow Sabbath day rest for the cooks. Many Mainers talk about eating beans for Sunday breakfast, or making sandwiches of cold beans on Sunday.

Beans baked in cast iron pots buried in the ground became a lumber camp specialty and remain popular in Maine to this day, particularly for public suppers and other special events. The variety of beans used in bean-hole beans are usually heirloom Colonial types such as Yellow Eye, Jacob’s Cattle and Soldier beans. These are large beans (about 1/2 inch long when dry).

Lumber Camp Menu

Foods high in calories and other fats, like pies and doughnuts, and high in proteins, like meats and beans, were needed to feed the hungry hard-working men in the Maine lumber-woods camps. The food was usually good, the men agreed, and there was plenty of it. “Fresh beef and all kinds of roast beef and potatoes. And beans, always had beans on the table every meal. And they had molasses gingerbread and sugar cake. . . .Always had bowls of applesauce or prunes. . . .Plenty of beef and potatoes and brown gravy. And on Fridays they had fish, cod or haddock. . . .Then they had pea soup and pie—mince pie, apple pie. . . .[Sunday] we always had a big meal–meat, beef, most generally and onions. . . .And clam chowder. They’d have a clam chowder, and probably beans.” [Ernest Kennedy, quoted in "Argyle Boom," Northeast Folklore 17 (1976); 120]

Songs were made about lumber-camp food. Larry Gorman, a Prince Edward Islander who came to Maine to work in the woods and later lived in Brewer, Maine. He made up songs about many things, including the lumber-woods work. One song, “The Good Old State of Maine” has two stanzas about lumber camp food:

Now for the grub, I’ll give it a rub, and that it does deserve,
The cooks become so lazy they’ll allow the men to starve;
For it’s bread and beans, then beans and bread, then bread and beans again,
Of grub we would sometimes have a change in that good old State of Maine
Our meat and fish is poorly cooked, the bread is sour and old;
The beans are dry and musty and doughnuts are hard and old;
To undertake to chew one, that would give your jaws a pain,
for they’re not the kind we used to find in that good old State of Maine.

^{[Edward D. Ives,} Larry Gorman: The Man Who Made The Songs ^{(Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 1964, 1977, 1993), 105} 

^From University of Maine Folklife Research

The big three for baked beans in Maine are all heirlooms.  Soldier, Yellow Eye and Jacob’s Cattle.  Me? I’m a Jacob’s Cattle guy.  A good friend of mine shipped a case of these beauties last week.  I now have 24 beautiful pounds of these lovelies that should last me for the better part of a year.