As the Fourth of July draws near, the much reduced coming events lists reveal the hit we’ve taken when it comes to our traditional, once taken-for-granted outings. We do sorely miss our Saturday night bean suppers.
These dinners trace back to the Puritans and their lengthy list of don’ts, which were especially ironclad when it came to the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day. It was a day of prayer with absolutely no physical labor. To cook a meal on the Sabbath, you risked a fine, shaming in the stocks, or a flogging.
Bean suppers are a staple of the Maine event calendar, especially during summer months. The dinners trace back to Puritan times. Courtesy photo
The Sabbath was church, a brief break for a cold family meal, and then back to the meeting house. The wife was forbidden to cook a meal and the meal break time was kept short, preventing Satan from snatching up idle sinners.
Houses in the early Puritan towns were built close together, so you could watch for lapsing sinners. If she tried to roast a chicken or meat, a snooping neighbor could easily catch the aromatic whiff and turn her in.
The Puritan wife was in a fix. Because of the physicality of their lives, her family members needed two to three times more calories a day than we do. She couldn’t have her family waste away from hunger every Sabbath.
The solution? Friday afternoons, she’d take a triple-sized batch of field beans and soak them overnight. Saturday morning, her now softened beans were doctored up with salt, pepper, dry mustard, chunks of salt pork, and a little molasses, which replaced the more costly sugar. It was all ladled into ceramic brown bean pots.
The brick beehive oven was heated and made ready for the day’s baking. The bean pots were loaded into the beehive for eight hours of baking, along with extra pies and loaves of brown bread.
That Saturday night’s supper was hot baked beans, warm pies, and freshly baked brown bread. The following morning, the Sabbath, the meal was repeated before church, then again during the short break, and later at day’s end. Four times in 24 hours.
The Puritans are gone and today’s Saturday night bean suppers are held in old Grange halls, churches, Masonic buildings, fire stations, and school cafeterias. A few are year-round, all others seasonally, but most have staked out one Saturday each month, giving devotees a multitude of choices.
Every region has its own versions of community suppers. Nova Scotia is famous for its summer and fall lobster dinners. Pig roasts draw hungry crowds in the more rural Maine counties. Catholic churches, especially in the South and Midwest, have a growing monopoly for their fish fries.
Our bean suppers are staffed by dedicated volunteers — bean soakers, cooks, table clearers, dish washers and the ticket sellers who do double duty as the hustlers of the raffle tickets or the 50/50 draw.
The supper proceeds are often earmarked for scholarships for local high school seniors or to help a family with their catastrophic medical bills.
Your neighbors staff the serving line which can offer two or three baked bean selections along with the hot dogs. Additional entrees – American chop suey or mac and cheese are often available. Freshly baked corn bread and summer salads are heaped on your plate. This is Maine value dining. No one leaves hungry.
The true 5-star measure of a bean supper can be found at the dessert table. Volunteers bring their hand-crafted pies. There are no store-bought frozen pie crusts here. These home-baked pies follow the Maine seasons.
Now, it would have been rhubarb, soon followed by strawberry and peach, and later with blueberry, cherry and apple pie masterpieces. There’s always meringue and cream pies, plus cookies and brownies.
At these suppers, you’ll see many three-generation families, some of the youngsters still in uniform from a just completed game. It’s also been a time to catch up with the lives of many of my former students from the previous century.
Though this summer still has two months left, I’m afraid we’ve lost our going-out-to-bean suppers season. The governor’s COVID-19 guidelines, just like those for dine-in restaurants, would limit the suppers to a 25 to 40 percent serving capacity. Like many of our restaurants are learning, you just can’t make it with those limited seating caps.
This summer’s void of baked bean deprivation has forced us to make do with substituting our at home fixings on the grill for the real thing.
We use Shield’s (local) hot dogs or plump brats. For the beans, you’ve got a tough choice of picking between Maine’s B & M beans or Tennessee-based Bush’s beans. They’re both locked in fierce competition, fighting for market share.
Empty the can onto a sheet of non-stick foil and doctor them up — ketchup, mustard, onions, hot sauce, a little molasses, or maple syrup. Close up the foil and tuck it into your grill’s lowest heat corner and let it simmer. Dessert and bread are easily covered, because there’s no shortage of great bakeries in our towns to find the perfect pies and dark, hearty breads.
If you have left-over beans, save them, like those Puritans did, and have them for breakfast. Most Maine diners and hole-in-the-walls serve up baked beans, hot or cold, as a breakfast side. So far, I haven’t been successful in convincing my wife that the old colonial practice of pie for breakfast should become a Murphy family tradition.
We’re hoping that this summer’s hiatus of a more than 300-year-old baked bean supper tradition is temporary and that our bean suppers will return again, when we cross over into whatever the new normal holds for us. After more than three months of home lockdown, we need that weekly opportunity to sit down with neighbors and new friends.
Tom Murphy is a former history teacher and state representative. He is a Kennebunk Landing resident and can be reached at tsmurphy@myfairpoint.net.
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