LETTER FROM BOBOLINK FARM

SATURDAY SUPPER

By Barbara Tatham Johnson

One of the first purchases of cooking paraphernalia that I made as a young newlywed was a bean pot. I had never baked a bean. I did not enjoy eating Boston baked beans, and I knew I would have to be pretty darn hungry, desperately hungry, to attempt to bake a pot of beans.

My husband, stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska, with the U.S. Air Force, had brought me a long way from the coast of Massachusetts where I had lived most of my life. I felt terribly homesick, and the bean pot represented home, familiar surroundings, the people who buoyed my life to that point, all that I missed in the rolling prairie landscape of America’s Midwest.

My husband was puzzled with the bean pot since he knew my aversion to Boston baked beans, and I could not admit aloud that a crockery pot was as comforting as his loving presence. In short order, love won out, and the pot sat out of sight and unused in the kitchen cabinet after its initial important role as a personal touchstone.

My grandmother was a basic cook; that is, she achieved her goal of satisfying the family’s appetite with a choice of several simple dishes. Baking beans for Saturday supper was, by far, her best effort. The step by step process fascinated me, and I could watch if I remained quiet.

Every Friday evening she picked over two pounds of pea, yellow-eye, or kidney beans, eliminating any pebbles or bits of dried mud that processing had missed in the packaging of the beans. After rinsing them, she poured the beans into a large club aluminum pot and covered them with water to soak overnight.

After breakfast on Saturday, she drained and rinsed the beans, now swollen to twice their original size, refilled the pot with the beans and enough water to cover them, and set them to simmer atop the wood- fired, bright blue, cast-iron Kalamazoo “Prince” range. She tested the beans for completed cooking by blowing across a spoonful of beans hot from the pot. If their skins cracked open slightly, they were cooked. She spooned the beans, with a slotted spoon to drain excess cooking water away, into her old brown crockery bean pots, one large and one small.

Years of experience helped her gauge just the right amount of molasses that flowed slowly from bottle into spoon and across the beans. A palm full of salt spilled out of her cupped palm into each pot, followed by several good shakes of black pepper. She stirred this together to distribute the molasses and salt thoroughly within the depths of the pots.

She nestled a large rectangle of salt pork, cleaned of excess salt coating, and cut to the rind in a crosshatch pattern of half-inch squares, firmly into the upper layers of beans, poured just enough water to cover the beans, and placed the beret shaped pot lids in place. Now the beans went into the oven to bake all day at a low heat. I tried to be in the kitchen after lunch to witness the removal of the pot lids and catch a glimpse of the once pale beans and pork now beginning to tan nicely from the molasses. Lidless, the pots were returned to bake until suppertime when the salt pork presented a crisply darkened incised surface agape to reveal its soft white fatty center, and the beans, deeply browned, bubbled in a thick dark sauce. The combination of sweet pork, molasses, and beans filled the kitchen with an aroma that would breach the fussiest appetite, but not mine.

How could something so delectable, so richly aromatic make me gag on the first mouthful? The other eight family members delighted in every bite, praised the cook, and had second helpings. I did well if I ate the small helping that my grandmother, mercifully not an overly temperamental cook, put on my plate. I had to chew the beans and not swallow them whole. I could add catsup and piccalilli or cole slaw, if that was on the table, to help out, but the mushiness of the beans between my teeth repelled me. Tomato sauce, pickle, and cabbage and carrot bits spiced up the mush, but they did not remove the repulsive softness. The idiosyncrasies of infant palates are the bane of parents and never understandable. I was well into adulthood before I could enjoy a plate of Boston baked beans. My grandmother was mystified but pleased.

The alchemy of the cooking and the family’s hearty praise were enough to help me love the occasion if not the beans. However, a second component of Saturday supper locked the meal firmly in my heart. This was the making and baking of cream of tartar biscuits and biscuit piggies. When the beans came out of the oven, wood was added to the firebox to raise the temperature in the oven. Several cups of flour, spoonfuls of cream of tartar baking powder, and salt were sifted into a large bowl. Several large spoonfuls of shortening were added to the flour mixture and broken and worked into the flour with deft, strong movements of my grandmother’s fingers. Her hands were beautiful and small. I watched with delight as she pinched and squeezed the shortening and flour into a mixture of uniform crumble. She added enough milk to moisten it into an easily worked dough, moist but not sticky. The speed with which she kneaded and shaped the dough onto a floured board amazed me. She rolled the dough into a thickness of about one-half inch and cut out large rounds with her biscuit cutter, placing each biscuit swiftly onto the greased baking sheets. The dough remaining after the rounds were cut became biscuit piggies for each of the five children.

Watching the piggies take shape was almost as marvelous as eating them. Fat dough balls were crimped, pinched, and patted at one side into a pig snout and two big floppy ears. On the opposite side, a deft pulling and rolling formed a tail that was coiled and patted with a fingertip against the dough body. The piggies went onto the sheets with the biscuit rounds and into the hot oven to emerge in half an hour expanded to double size and golden. The biscuit piggie did help the beans go down, but I always left enough of the wonderful buttered body to savor after my plate was cleaned.

“Oh, I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, and I feed my horse on corn and beans,” my grandfather sang out when he came into the house and smelled the aroma of Saturday’s supper. Comforted with the certainty of a biscuit pig, I thought Captain Jinks’s horse was welcome to my share of the beans, but the song set the tone for laughter and conversation at the table.

The gentle satisfying rumbles of escaping smelly gas throughout the evening as we read or played games (and my diminished serving did not deprive me of flatulence) represented satisfaction. We joked about the loud and the soft, the “rowser” and the fart. A joke I heard years later when I had lived in Maine awhile was not part of our repartee then, but it would have brought that certain look from my grandmother and gales of laughter from the family.

A couple is enjoying a good bean supper in the local diner. A man a few stools down the counter rips off a great, smelly fart.

“How dare you do such a thing before my wife!” says the offended husband.

“If I knew we were taking turns, I would have let her go first,” retorts the satisfied customer.

The Nebraska bean pot sits in my cupboard today. In time I used it to cook casseroles and such but never beans. Its value as a reminder of the warmth of the kitchen table surrounded by contentment and laughter is as strong now as it was when I missed my family long ago and far away. For all my dislike of baked beans, I never left that table with an empty stomach. Nourishment comes from more than what is on the plate.

 

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