How to Cook a Moose (35 page)

We got our milk, eggs, and vegetables from the biodynamic farm down in the valley below us, where my little sisters were campers at the Hawthorne Valley Farm Camp. Once a week, the counselors made a shopping run to the nearest supermarket, which for all I know was in Hudson, and brought back bags of oats, dried beans, molasses, whole-wheat flour, spices, rice, lentils, canned goods, and other basic staples.

That summer, sadly, was the closest I've ever come to living the way people lived in the Maine lumber camps and the game wardens' cabins up in the Allagash. I've read every book I can get my mitts on about that way of life; by all accounts, it was a hell of a lot of fun. The most famous of these is, of course,
We Took to the Woods
by Louise Dickinson Rich, but there are others:
Nine Mile Bridge
by Helen Hamlin and
My Life in the Maine Woods
by Annette Jackson are two of my favorites. These women—and men, too, in some cases—all write about the sheer joy of living in the far northern wilderness of lakes and rivers and woods and almost no roads, year-round, in almost total isolation. I love the vicarious sense of adventure I get, reading about their unforgettable experiences in the thrilling scenery, the sense of peace and self-sufficiency, the deep satisfaction of hard work, all the canoeing and snowshoeing and skiing and fishing and hunting, the cutting of wood and planting of gardens. These are some of the most purely joyful books I've ever read.

Louise Dickinson Rich described the Pond-in-the-River dam on a day when the river drivers opened the gates to let the pulpwood go downstream: “It's lovely on the dam on a bright spring morning, with the wind blowing down across the boom and filling the air with the sharp smell of resin, so strong and fresh that you can taste it. The planks tremble under your feet, and the roar of the river and the
thumping of the wood fill the ears. The river is deep blue and crisping white, and the cut ends of the pulp are like raw gold in the sun. All the senses come alive, even that rare sense that tells you, half a dozen times between birth and death—if you are lucky—that right now, right in this spot, you have fallen into the pattern of the universe.”

Dickinson Rich also wrote with almost as much happy exuberance about their every-Saturday-night meal in their cabin on the Androscoggin River: “Baked beans can be terrible or they can be swell . . . baked beans have to be baked. That sounds like a gratuitous restatement of the obvious, but it isn't. Some misguided souls boil beans all day and call the lily-livered result baked beans. I refrain from comment.”

She gives her recipe as follows, and I'd trust it over just about any other one, if only because she writes with such authority and certainty on the matter, and she isn't someone I'd care to contradict or cross: I'd rather hang out with her in the North Woods for a while, going along happily and trustingly on any adventure she cared to propose, eating any meal she cooked.

We use either New York State or Michigan white beans, because we like them best, although yellow-eyes are very popular, too. I take two generous cups of dry beans, soak overnight and put them on to boil early in the morning. When the skins curl off when you blow on them, they've boiled long enough. Then I put in the bottom of the bean pot, or iron kettle with a tight-fitting cover, a six-by-eight square of salt pork, with the rind slashed every quarter of an inch, a quarter of a cup of sugar, half a cup of molasses, a large onion chopped fairly fine, and a heaping teaspoonful of dry mustard. This amount of sugar and molasses may be increased or cut, depending on whether you like your beans sweeter or not so sweet. This is a matter every man has to decide for himself. The beans are dumped in on top of this conglomerate and enough hot water is added to cover, but only cover. The baking pot should be
large enough so there's at least an inch of free-board above the water. Otherwise they'll boil over and smell to high heaven. Cover tightly and put into a medium oven—about 350 is right. They should be in the oven by half past nine in the morning at the latest, and they should stay there till suppertime, which in our family is at six.

She goes on to say that “there is no trick” to making good baked beans besides baking them correctly—the right amount of water, proper tending, and even oven temperature. And you have to be willing to stay right by those beans all day and not go anywhere else. But it's worth it: “My beans are brown and mealy, and they swim in a thick brown juice. They're good. I always serve them with corn bread, ketchup and pickles.”

Camp Agawamuck's session was only eight weeks long, and I was there almost forty years ago, but even though it was nothing compared to Dickinson Rich's transcendent joy, I remember my time there as totally absorbing, happy, and challenging in the best way. And I remember, too, the smell of a pot of beans cooking over a campfire, how good they tasted, and the complete satiation they gave me after a long day spent hiking and paddling and swimming outside. When you're truly hungry, there is nothing better than a bowl full of warm beans with brown bread and butter. I slept deeply afterwards in my sleeping bag, tucked in my aluminum-and-canvas cot with a full stomach, piney air blowing in the screened tent window, and the sound of boughs overhead in the wind.

At the end of the summer, I arrived back home in Arizona in time to begin high school. I was clear-eyed (because of severe allergies, I hadn't been able to wear my contact lenses all summer; highly myopic,
I'd managed wilderness camp without them, learned to gauge distances and depths, to identify trees, to hike and rock-climb in an increasingly familiar blur until I forgot all about them and started to “see” things in my own half-blind way). I was brown and strong, and my head was full of the smells and sounds and sights of the woods and memories of campfire suppers. I was, in fact, “full of beans.”

In Maine, Saturday or Sunday beans seem to be traditional fare just about everywhere, going back to the Pilgrims, who cooked baked beans and brown bread the night before, the story goes, so as not to have to cook on the Sabbath. The tradition stuck in part, I imagine, because of the cozy familiarity of the meal, that delicious, cheap, nourishing, stick-to-the-ribs quality: It makes you want to hunker down with friends around a long table and just dig right in.

Brown bread has been the traditional accompaniment to beans for a good long time. Like most local food traditions, its origins are born of thrifty necessity. In other words, early New Englanders had more cornmeal and rye flour than wheat flour; the three were combined in bread, helping to conserve precious stores of wheat. Many settlers in New England cooked their meals in fireplaces, instead of ovens, so they came up with a way to steam bread in the fireplace, usually in a cylindrical metal or glass mold, a precursor to today's coffee can. They'd been taught by Native Americans, who also showed them how to use corn as a grain for bread. Cornmeal often was called “Indian.” In her directions for making brown bread in the 1828
American Frugal Housewife
, Lydia Maria Child wrote: “Put the Indian in your bread pan, sprinkle a little salt among it, and wet it thoroughly with scalding water. . . . Be sure and have hot water enough, for Indian absorbs a great deal of water.”

“Brown bread is as old as our country,” James Beard wrote in
American Cookery
. “Everyone seems to treasure an ‘original' recipe, handed down from the founding families.”

Brown Bread

One cup of sweet milk,

One cup of sour,

One cup of corn meal,

One cup of flour.

Teaspoon of soda,

Molasses one cup;

Steam for three hours,

Then eat it all up.

—
Old Yankee Cookbook

The Folklife Center's archivist interviewed one Robert Campbell of Glenburn, Maine, who had been baking beans in a bean hole for nearly forty years. “Even when I don't need the beans,” he said, “when Friday night comes it's just an urge comes over me to start that fire and start baking bean-hole beans.”

In this same archive of interviews, Diane Conary of Old Town, Maine, recalled, “Mom always made them the same way. She always used white beans. Always picked over them first, ‘had to get the little stones out.' My favorite was big beans. Dad liked either big or small beans. Mom preferred the little beans. To make the beans, use salt pork, onion, just a little bit of white sugar, and a little dried mustard. Parboil the beans on the stove first. Then put them in a pot, a special crock. Then they cooked in the stove, an oil stove, all Friday night. Mom would get up in the middle of the night and add water.

“They were done Saturday morning, but we didn't eat them until Saturday night. They stayed warm. Years ago, I guess about 85 percent of the people around here had beans on Saturday night. We always had bread. Mom didn't make brown bread. Sometimes she would get brown bread in a can with raisins. That was a real treat! We would spread butter on it.”

The “bean suppah” seems to be a mainstay of the social life of churches during the summer and early fall; I see signs for them all through the byways of Maine, in towns and in the countryside, inland, in the lakes region, and up the coast. When my grandmother used to rent a house in Midcoast Maine every summer for herself and my grandfather, she went to all the local church rummage sales, and she would often stay for the bean supper afterwards. She loved them, although she deplored the fact that she couldn't get a proper cup of tea afterwards. (I can just see my tiny, literary tea snob of a grandmother squinting askance at the inferior tea of rural Maine, her stomach full of excellent local beans.)

As a sign of the changing times around here, the Maine Council of Churches has provided a page on their website aimed at making these traditionally socially sanctioned calorie- and fat-fests healthier and more locally conscious, creating a downloadable resource kit for churches and other groups that are interested in offering a new version of the traditional bean “suppah” or other community meals. “We have suggestions for healthier versions of favorite recipes,” they promise. “We've also included local sources for produce and other goods so your meal will support your community farmers and other local businesses. Locally farmed foods are generally better for the environment, as the goods do not travel thousands of miles to reach our dinner plates. And many local farms practice organic and other environmentally friendly methods of production.”

Now that's Christian fellowship, Maine style.

Chapter Eleven

Rock Farmers and Stone Soup

“Life in the Maine frontier was serious business,” writes Colin Woodard in
The Lobster Coast
, “and those who survived under these conditions had to be stubborn, self-sufficient, and able to endure considerable physical and emotional punishment.” During an unspeakably violent, decades-long era in Maine's history, “at the close of the fourth Indian war in 1726, Midcoast Maine was a desolate wasteland” of “burned and looted farms, villages, fishing camps, and, undoubtedly, the remains of people who once lived in them.” Farmland and pastures and cleared fields returned to scrub and saplings; long-abandoned towns were covered in forty-year-old forests. The region was described as a “howling wilderness.”