How to Cook a Moose (34 page)

Arguably, the other essential vegetable of Maine is also a starchy one, which seems appropriate, given the length of the winters up here and the fact that both can be stored well throughout the cold season and eaten till the first asparagus pokes its head up in early spring. It's that dried, nutritious staple of larders and cupboards and jars in every kitchen, the humble bean.

It strikes me, from what I've heard and read, that almost nothing says Maine more than “bean hole.”

During the months when they left the coast and its rich and teeming sea life and migrated inland for the short growing season in Maine and the White Mountains, the Wabanaki farmed. They did this long before the European settlers arrived, but their methods have been preserved and practiced for centuries afterwards.

Corn, squash, and beans, that holy trinity of symbiosis and nutrition, were their primary crops. Like all Native farmers from Nova Scotia to Mesoamerica, they interplanted them in the same mounds. The three plants nourished the soil and provided support for one another in a variety of ingenious ways. The cornstalks allowed the bean vines to climb; the vines stabilized the stalks in strong winds; the beans fixed the nitrogen in the soil for the next year's crop of corn;
and the shallow-rooted squash vines covered the base of the mound, living mulch that kept the soil from drying out and prevented weeds from growing. The spiny squash plants also repelled predators from the corn and beans. Every season, the plant matter left over from the harvest was mixed back into the ground as fertilizer and compost. And these “three sisters” in combination were nutritional perfection: The corn gave carbohydrates, the dried beans supplied protein, and the squash contained vitamins and minerals, and their seeds could be made into oil.

The Wabanaki made a traditional bean-and-corn dish called “hull corn soup.” Dried white corn kernels were boiled for half an hour in hardwood ashes and water, a weak lye solution that “cleaned” them; white corn kernels are larger than yellow, not nearly as sweet, and they're encased in an inedible, tough outer hull. Afterwards, the now-blackened skins had to be removed, a time-consuming process they made go faster by kibitzing as they hand-rubbed each kernel. These hulled kernels were added to dried yellow-eye beans, with salt pork or venison when meat was available, and plenty of water. The Wabanaki also baked yellow-eye beans with maple syrup and bear fat in ceramic pots in the ground.

The European-descended newcomers to New England adapted their own versions of both the corn soup, which they called succotash, and the baked beans, but both recipes originated with the Wabanaki. According to the University of Maine's excellent Maine Folklife Center website, “the most unique cooking process for beans in Maine developed in the Maine logging camps. Pork and beans, baked in a bean hole, remains the logger's main dish. The slow, long cooking makes the bean very digestible as well as tender and delicious. In the logging camps, beans were served at every meal.”

They go on to describe the bean hole as “a stone-lined pit in which a fire is built until a good bed of coals forms. A cast-iron bean
pot (holds about eleven pounds of dried beans) is lowered into the pit, covered over with dirt, and allowed to cook, usually overnight. Several bean pits could keep beans cooking at all times.”

According to lore, the loggers learned to make bean-hole beans from the Native Americans, and then other Mainers learned from the loggers. The tradition was so popular among Mainers that it continued after the logging camps were abandoned. Even now, bean holes can be found at family camps throughout Maine. There's evidently something about ritualistic underground slow-cooking that appeals deeply to Mainers, whether it's a clambake or a bean hole.

Beans are nutritious, no doubt about it. They're full of calcium and iron and protein, as well as fiber and the “good” kind of carbohydrates that keep you full for a long time. The expression “full of beans” says it all. And they're delicious, adaptable, easy to grow, harvest, and store, and relatively cheap. Like the potato, probably because of their richness in starch, beans are cooling in hot weather and warming in cold. They'll do any dance with any partner, as long as you treat them with patience and respect.

Of course, there are plenty of jokes about beans, beans, the musical fruit, and we've all made them and heard them and we all know why they're so funny, but if dried beans are properly soaked and rinsed and prepared, they aren't as likely to upset anyone's digestive system (or their family members' olfactory delicacy). Although I've never tried this, I've heard that if you stick a piece of kombu, or kelp, in the cooking water, its enzymes will break down the raffinose sugars in beans, the culprits that produce those offensive gases.

A pot of baked beans in an oven, simmering away for hours on a cold winter afternoon, is one of the most comforting smells I know of.
Baked beans are so easy to make, and so rewarding when they emerge from their long slow hot bath: rich and deep, porky and molasses-y, salty and sweet, soft and dense. And the beans retain their shape and integrity through it all, whether you use Jacob's Cattle beans from Fryeburg or Midcoast yellow-eyes.

In Arizona, chili was always on our school lunch menus in the early 1970s, and I was an instant fan. The Arizona version of chili had both beans and meat, as well as peppers and tomatoes and corn. In college in Portland, Oregon, I taught myself how to make it from scratch. When I moved to New Hampshire, and then Maine, I developed a version using local ingredients that's cheap, easy, and fun to make. It's a warming, hearty supper on a crisp October night when the chilly wind is blowing the dry leaves against the windows and the sun sets unexpectedly early and you suddenly know in your bones that winter is coming, again.

Arizona Native's Yankee Farm Stand Chili

I have mixed feelings about some of the farm stands up here. On the one hand, they can seem like a bit of a scam—much of their fresh produce is trucked from Vermont, or even farther, the same exact stuff I find at Hannaford, but more expensive and not as consistently fresh or organic. On the other hand, their frozen meats—especially their poultry, but also the lamb and pork, is the best and most flavorful available. And they have bins of heirloom dried beans. In Fryeburg, I find Jacob's Cattle and soldier beans, which are grown in Western Maine; yellow-eye beans are more popular on the coast. They also have local maple syrup and beautiful, varied, heaping piles of locally grown gourds, squashes, and pumpkins in the fall.

One day, at Sherman Farm Stand over in Fryeburg, Maine, a few miles from the farmhouse, I got a wild hair of inspiration and pulled together
the ingredients for this chili. I've made it a few times, and I would confidently enter it into a Yankee Farm Stand Chili contest, if one existed . . .

When you wake up in the morning, add 2 cups of dry Jacob's Cattle or soldier beans to at least 12 cups of boiling water. Turn off the flame and soak for a few hours, covered. At noon or so, rinse them well, put them back into the pot, and add just enough fresh water to cover them plus an inch or two. Bring to a boil again and simmer them, covered, until they're soft.

In a big soup pot or Dutch oven, heat 1/2 cup peanut or canola oil. Add 2 chopped yellow onions, 8 chopped garlic cloves, and 3 chopped jalapeno peppers. Stir and add 4 T chili powder, 1 tsp oregano, 1 tsp cumin, 1 T paprika, a dash of cayenne pepper, 2 to 4 tsp salt, 1 tsp black pepper, and 2 medium bay leaves. Stir well and sauté on low. When onions soften, add 1 lb. ground turkey. Stir and sauté on low heat for 6 to 7 minutes.

Add 3 ears' worth of fresh raw corn, removed from cob, and 4 chopped large ripe tomatoes. Stir well. Add 1 chopped red pepper, 1 chopped yellow pepper, and 1 chopped orange pepper. Stir well again. After a few minutes, add the drained, cooked beans, 1 24-oz. can of diced fire-roasted tomatoes, and 2 cups chicken broth. Bring just to a boil, then turn down. Let sit, simmering and uncovered, for 1 1/2 hours. Add more chicken broth as needed. Taste and adjust seasonings. Serve with bowls of minced red onions, chopped avocado, sour cream, and chopped cilantro. Serves 2 people for several meals and gets better every day.

The summer I turned fourteen, in 1976, I went to Agawamuck wilderness camp in Upstate New York, above the tiny hamlet of Harlemville. There, we campers learned how to make brown bread steamed in a coffee can in a trivet in a kettle alongside baked beans in
a cast-iron pot, over an open fire. Outdoor cooking was part of our wilderness training; I'm certain we also learned to make other things, but camp-cooked baked beans and brown bread are what I remember most about our al fresco culinary education. We also slept in tents on platforms in the woods, went on four-day canoe trips, took twenty-mile hikes, did “balance” courses, and collected and drew leaves and insects for purposes of identification.

Someone at the camp, some counselor, must have been a Mainer. The brown bread, made with whole-wheat flour, rye flour, cornmeal, and molasses, leavened with baking soda, was cylindrical and dense and damp and sweet with raisins; the circular thick slices were addictive, slathered with butter, hot from the coffee can where the bread had steamed for a couple of hours next to the bean pot. The bean pot itself was a crusty old thing, impossible to get entirely clean in our outdoor sink with its cold-water pump, but we tried.

We were twelve campers in all, six boys and six girls between twelve and fourteen years old. Naturally, various dramatic, intense, unforgettable romances and alliances formed between us in the eight weeks of camp. While our hearts broke and swelled and fell in love and broke again, we also became physically strong and quick and hardy, we budding teenagers who might otherwise have spent the summer lounging in front of the TV eating potato chips, tanning at the local pool, and mooching around the mall, or at slumber parties, making crank calls and eating sugar cereal and flirting with call-in radio deejays and playing “Light as a Feather” and summoning ghosts with the Ouija board.

Instead, we woke up early, gathered around the dining table for camp-made granola and milk from the farm below, spent our days in the woods and on the rivers, and spent our evenings after dinner in the assembly tent, a huge tepee on a platform in the woods; there, we sang and told stories until bedtime, miles from any mall, far from the
nearest TV set. If we wanted to swim, we jumped into the pond in the meadow just down the mountain.