Bean There

I was sorting through a folder of recipes the other day when I came across a photocopy of a page in my Aunt Harriett's handwriting. The recipe was for Kennebunkport Beans. There were many things we loved about staying with Aunt Harriett, but those beans were a bane of any visit to her house when we were kids. 

Looking at the recipe, I could see what we objected to. I remembered the olives as an ingredient we found strange and disgusting, but the dish itself, with its salt pork, cubed beef, celery salt, and cheese is not very kid-friendly at all. Still, I was intrigued, and since we have been eating a lot of beans lately anyway, I added the ingredients to my shopping list. 

When we were kids, we never associated Kennebunkport with anything other than those awful beans. It took me many years of, first hearing about the Bush summer home in Maine, and then literally driving past the town for a dozen trips or more to Acadia National Park, to make the connection between one of my favorite states, Maine, with one of my least favorite childhood memories. 

At the end of our week up there this summer, my sister-in-law, Emily, and I stopped at a grocery store we hadn't been to yet, despite spending at least a hundred dollars a day to feed our party of eleven. On the bottom of one of the shelves in this small market where most of our fellow shoppers were neither tourists, nor wealthy summer residents, but rather real locals, Emily found an assortment of 2 pound ziplocks full of dried beans. "These look really good," she said. "Want to get them and split them to take home?" 

"Sure," I said, and examining the bags I saw that they were labeled Soldier Beans and Jacob's Cattle Beans. I had never heard of either, but they turned out to be heirloom varieties that have been grown in Maine for centuries. 

My research on beans, soldier, cattle, and Kennebunkport, turned up references to a vintage cook book, Good Maine Food. First published in 1947 by Maine author Kenneth Roberts' niece and secretary, Marjorie Mosser, the story goes that when Roberts published an article in The Saturday Evening Post about some of his favorite boyhood dishes, he began to receive hundreds of letters, many from fellow Mainers, about their favorite foods. Intrigued, Marjorie embarked on a writing project of her own. The final product, which intersperses Roberts’ comments and anecdotes with recipes and other how-tos has been described as "not just a cook book, it's a way of life. It tells you everything about cooking, working, farming, and hunting, in Maine," and "a must-own collection for any cook." Of course I ordered my used copy right away, since despite what those critics say, it is currently out of print.

Even though my cook book hasn’t been delivered yet, I was able to catch a glimpse of the recipe for Kennebunkport Beans on Google Books, and it is definitely the source my aunt was working from, although, like a game of telephone, recipes change a bit as they are shared from person to person. There is a bit of commentary in the book about what kind of beans to use. Neatly sidestepping a local controversy concerning proper bean usage, Mosser mentions soldier beans and yellow-eyed beans by name, but also gives permission for her readers to use any variety of bean they like.

It's soldier beans for me.