The Growlery (March 2004),
Essays by
Michael Gilleland
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The Growlery (March 2004),
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Baked Beans
Maine Lingo
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When I was a boy, there was no need to ask what was for supper on Saturday night, because the answer was always the same -- baked beans. The type of bean might differ. We never knew whether we'd have navy beans, pinto beans, Jacob's cattle, or a mixture, but baked beans, in some form or other, were a Saturday night fixture, seldom if ever altered. In his book Maine Lingo, John Gould claims that Jacob's cattle is a bean native to Maine. I don't know whether his claim is true or not, but I can't recall ever eating Jacob's cattle outside of the Pine Tree State. It's a local delicacy, like Moxie, whoopie pies, and fiddleheads.
Some members of our family had a professional interest in beans. The one time I visited our Hélie relatives near Trois Rivières, Quebec, I toured their bakery, in which they made not only bread, but also beans in a brick oven for sale. I sampled them, and they were delicious. At home, we didn't cook our beans in a brick oven. Instead, we used a pressure cooker, a scandal to the orthodox, who handed down their bean pots as family heirlooms.
Bean suppers were a popular meal in our neck of the woods, not only at home, but also as a fund raiser for schools, churches, and civic organizations. You could drive on almost any country road, and you wouldn't have to go far before you'd see a sign advertising a bean supper, open to the public. I remember when my high school band sponsored a bean supper to raise money. Hundreds of people showed up. It was a gala event of the social season. Maybe things are different today, but I hope not.
Historical novelist and Maine native Kenneth Roberts (1885-1957) was particularly fond of beans. In his essay "A Maine Kitchen," he sings a paean to his grandmother's baked beans:
Thursday nights were big nights for the young fry in Grandmother's house, because that was the night for boiled dinner; but the biggest night of all was Saturday night. The rich scent of cooking had percolated through the house all day, and above all the other scents had risen the meaty, fruity, steamy odor of baked beans.
Ah me! Those Saturday night dinners of baked beans, brown bread, cottage cheese, Grandma's ketchup; and for a grand finale, chocolate custards! I can hear myself, a child again, begging and begging for another plate of beans -- just one more plate of beans; hear the inexorable voice of authority say firmly, "You've had three plates already!" And in spite of that I can hear myself, pestlike, continuing to beg, "Just three beans! Just three more!" I usually got three additional beans, no more, no less; and always they were as delicious, as rich, as tantalizing in their toothsome mellowness as the first spoonful had been.
Other may insist on soufflés, ragouts, entremets, vol-au-vents; but I prefer baked beans cooked the way my grandmother used to cook them.
He waxes no less eloquent in another essay entitled "An Inquiry into Diets:"
I have also viewed with favor a commodious platter of corned beef hash, or a savory mess of pea beans, impregnated with pork, molasses, mustard, and onion in the proper proportion; then baked about thirty-six hours in a well-ripened bean pot.
My baked-bean record, to the best of my knowledge and belief, compares favorably with that of any New Englander. From my earliest years I have had what might almost be called an affinity for baked beans, especially when lubricated with homemade tomato catsup from which all sweetening has been religiously excluded.
When confronted with a successful baking of beans, I have frequently attacked them enthusiastically on Saturday night, gladly repeated on Sunday morning, then toyed with two or three platefuls, cold, on Sunday evening, and made a final clean-up of the bean situation at my Monday morning breakfast.
Baked beans also play a role in Roberts' novels, for example in his Rabble in Arms (1929), about Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec during the American Revolutionary War. The protagonist, Steven Nason, describes an evening at the family home:
My oldest sister Hepsibah stood guard over the bean pots to make sure the pork was on top for its final browning, which is one reason for the toothsomeness of the bean as cooked in our family. Coarse fare though it may be, I would liefer have it as Malary cooked it, and as Cynthia still cooks it, than all the ragouts and French flummeries you can show me. (chapter II)In an Abenaki Indian encampment, faced with a meal of venison dipped in sugared raccoon fat, Nason muses:
Seeing the pleasure my father took in this food, I tried it and found it had merit, though I shall never prefer it to three or four platters of my sister Cynthia's baked beans, laced with my mother's sauce made from cucumbers and onions. (chapter VI)Aboard the sloop Eunice bound for Newburyport, he has beans for breakfast:
If there is a better or tastier breakfast than beans and mustard pickle and coffee and hot bread and an apple pie with cinnamon, I have never found it in many years of traveling. (chapter XIV)In chapter XXVI, the soldiers on the expedition to Quebec, starving and reduced to eating boiled leather for sustenance, argue about the best way to soften beans in preparation for baking (parboiling or overnight soaking), about the best accompaniment to beans (hot bread or sour milk cheese), and about what makes beans less "windy" (mustard or parboiling). One thing they don't talk about is the proper sweetening (molasses, brown sugar, or maple syrup). In the Northeastern corner of the United States, some people debate these matters with the same fervor that you hear when you listen to Southerners discussing barbecue.
And finally, when Steven Nason returns home to Arundel, what's the first sight that greets him?
My sister Cynthia stood by the brick oven holding a bean pot cover in her hand and peering at the beans. (chapter XXXVI)
Beans are a standing joke in a book by Roberts' contemporary Don Marquis (1878-1937), entitled The Almost Perfect State (1927), a satire on utopian writing. Marquis attributes the downfall of civilizations to the popularity of the bean, and keeps promising a full chapter on the evil influence of what he calls the "criminal vegetable."
It is our own conviction that certain vegetables -- notably the bean -- have had a deleterious effect upon the human race, and we have planned a chapter on beans in which this so-called article of food shall be brought to the bar of judgement.
Of course, the chapter was never written -- this way to get a laugh is at least as old as Artemus Ward's lecture "The Babes in the Woods," which Mark Twain called "the funniest thing I ever listened to" and in which Ward talked about everything under the sun except the babes in the wood, despite his promises to do so.
The closest Don Marquis comes to a chapter against beans is the story (pp. 81-87) of Giles, a bean addict, who ruins himself and his golden-haired daughter though his inability to keep the pledge to abstain from beans. The story ends with this moral:
Girls and boys, shun the first bean! If you take the first false step the second and third and the hundredth false steps are so fatally easy. We do not know when anything has saddened us more than the sight of this little golden-haired girl, flushed and mad with beans, knowing the depths and abysses that lie before her, and yet plunging recklessly and willfully toward them!
The Almost Perfect State ends with a delightful appendix on the proper way to bake beans. The recipe is genuine, and calls for one ingredient I haven't seen elsewhere -- bay leaves.
The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, best known for the Pythagorean theorem, forbade his followers to eat beans. That's one philosophical sect I could never join.
A final word on the bean. British comedian Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean skits are some of the funniest slapstick comedy I've ever seen, rivalling the Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy. My wife pointed out to me that the choral music at the beginning of each skit has the Latin lyrics "Ecce homo qui est faba," that is, "Behold the man who is a bean."
John Gould's book Maine Lingo: Boiled Owls, Billdads, & Wazzats (Camden: Down East Books, 1975) is a delightful read. It's head and shoulders above books with a similar aim, such as How to Talk Minnesotan and How to Speak Southern. Lacking, however, are footnotes and bibliography, and this little essay is an attempt to supply attributions for some items listed by Gould and also to suggest additional possible Maine words and expressions which Gould might have included but didn't.
My sources for these attributions and additions are some books by Maine author C.A. Stephens (1844-1931), who wrote thousands of stories for The Youth's Companion, many of them set on a farm in the vicinty of Norway, Maine, and featuring a group of orphans (Addison, Theodora, Halstead, Ellen, Wealthy, and the narrator) being raised by their grandparents, the Old Squire and Grandmother Ruth. These stories contain a wealth of technical detail about rural Maine life in the last half of the nineteenth century, especially about such pursuits as making maple sugar, haying, cutting cordwood, etc. The books are also full of many curious words and expressions which could fall under the heading of "Maine Lingo," although they may well have had circulation outside of the Pine Tree State. I've culled some of these from the following books by C.A. Stephens:
Some words used by Stephens find a place in Gould's book (hereafter abbreviated ML):
But other words are missing from ML:
Our afternoon recess was spent up at the west barn, playing a game of "gool" on the long floor. I recollect that Thomas succeeded in "going around," and won the game for his side, by climbing over the "great beams" far up in the roof of the barn.I suspect that the point of gool is to move from one end of a room to the other without stepping on the floor. I played such a game when I was a boy, although we didn't have a name for it.
Many more lexicographical nuggets await the careful reader who mines the stories of C.A. Stephens.
If I were independently wealthy or retired, I would probably spend most of every day in an academic library. There is probably no place on earth where I feel more comfortable, surrounded by miles of bookshelves. As it is, I'm lucky if I have the opportunity to spend an hour a week on average in a good library.
I offer the following commandments for academic librarians in the full realization that financial hardships prevent the observance of most of them.
By "independent scholar" I mean one with no academic affiliation, e.g. taxicab drivers with Ph.D.'s or just ordinary folk with a scholarly bent. For ten years after he failed his examinations at Oxford, A.E. Housman toiled as an independent scholar when he wasn't working as a patent office clerk. In evenings at the British Museum Library Housman acquired the immense erudition that eventually bore fruit in his magnum opus, an edition of the Roman astronomical poet Manilius.
Many academic libraries already do let independent scholars borrow books, for a fee. When I lived in Atlanta, I borrowed books from Emory University's library, and now that I reside in the Twin Cities area, I can check books out from the University of Minnesota's library. There are restrictions (only 10 books can be borrowed at a time, and interlibrary loan is forbidden) but they are not terribly onerous. Other libraries cruelly refuse even this basic courtesy to independent scholars. The University of Saint Thomas allows those who live within a few blocks of campus to borrow books, but I live two blocks beyond the perimeter, and a few years ago the head librarian refused my request for a relaxation of the rules.
There are 34 locations (i.e. separate libraries) listed on the University of Minnesota Library Hours web page. This is just for the Twin Cities campus. I realize that it's difficult for a sprawling urban campus to keep all its library books in one spot. But the splitting of the collection has reached absurd lengths -- the music library is in a separate building within sight of Wilson Library (one of the main repositories).
On the weekends, the library is manned by a skeleton staff. Would it cost that much more to keep it open at least twelve hours per day?
At the University of Minnesota library, old books (especially those printed before 1900) are evidently considered passé. They are slowly being moved to a sub-basement annex, the Minnesota Library Access Center, or MLAC (librarians love acronyms), which is not readily accessible by the ordinary patron:
MLAC is a statewide facility for long-term storage of important but lesser-used items.... Because of the unique, high-density, storage conditions at MLAC walk-in or on-demand service is not available. Patrons should allow 2-5 days for retrieval and delivery of items.The MLAC web page should have as its motto "Lasciate ogni speranza." About half of the books I want to look at have been banished in this way. The latest was Arthur Stanley Pease's commentary on Cicero's De Divinatione. When you need a book, you need it immediately, not in a few days when the excitement of the chase has grown cold.
The University of Minnesota library has many gaps, at least in its holdings of ancient Greek and Latin literature -- it lacks such fundamental works as Wessner's edition of Donatus' scholia on Terence, Keil's Grammatici Latini, Schwartz's edition of the scholia on Euripides, to name only a few books I have wanted to consult but couldn't. But the last time I went to the library and sat down in a carrel, there was a copy of the shooting script of The Truman Show movie. It's enough to make one weep.
A mis-shelved book is no better than a book lost. It is amazing how often I see books in wrong spots. On a recent visit I saw a couple of volumes of Plato mixed in with Plautus, even though the call numbers diverged greatly. In some libraries, it used to be the custom once a year or so for librarians to "walk the shelves" and correct these mistakes.
The University of Minnesota uses the Library of Congress classification system for new acquisitions, but still has thousands of books with Dewey Decimal numbers. If I want to look at commentaries on Vergil, I need to go to two different floors of the library. It's good exercise, tramping up and down the stairs, but my limited time is precious to me.
I mourn the demise of the old-fashioned card catalog. The computer terminals at the University of Minnesota library are of two types. Most require a login (I have no user id), and only a few are open terminals. So now, before I go to the library, I must look up at home the call numbers of books I want to look at. With the old, low-tech card catalog, these tricks weren't necessary.
The computerized catalog has errors in it -- try looking up the Greek philosopher Teles as an author. You won't find Hense's edition (Teletis reliquiae) that way. But if you look up Teles as a title, you will find Hense's edition. I'll wager this is one error that will never be fixed. At least with the old-fashioned card catalog, you could easily and quickly check a few cards forward or backwards and likely find what you were looking for.