The Kennebec Report

Bean Supper

Up here, this is more properly pronounced "bean suppah"; in fact, you sometimes see it spelled this way in print materials, to emphasize its Down East-ness.

And bean suppahs, er, suppers, are extremely common in northern New England. A bean supper is exactly what ti sounds like: a thrifty meal that features Boston baked beans as them main dish, sometimes supplemented with pork, or more commonly, hot dogs. They are social affairs, designed as potlucks and often tied to some kind of fundraising event or charity. Mainers hold bean suppers to raise funds for children who face life-threatening illnesses; to gather people for an annual town meeting, in the villages that still hold them; to raise money for a church's outreach efforts; and so on. I've seen them adverised for all of these purposes, and often they are simply social gatherings as well. People getting together for a local agricultural fair (which Maine abounds in) might kick off the first night with a bean supper.

Despite the fact that I've lived here almost three years now, last Saturday was the first time that I had actually attended a bean supper. My parish has had a lobster roll supper before, which is always tied to its city's annual summer parade and festival, but this was the real thing at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Augusta: four Crock-pots filled with beans and lots of fixings around them. The good UU people are hosting a series of bean suppers to raise funds for the statewide organization seeking to preserve gay marriage in the state, and this seems to me to be a good way of continuing a noble tradition of direct democracy combined with beans for supper.

And, as tends to be the case in a cold-weather climate where people eat to stay warm, there was an enormous amount of food: beans, of course, and hot dogs, but various salads, sides, rolls, coffee, tea, soft drinks, vegetables, cheese and crackers, fruit, and desserts. And what desserts! Though the rain has destroyed about 75% of Maine's strawberry crop, someone got strawberries and brounght them in for fresh homemade strawberry shortcake -- a treat one should only get once or twice a year, just as a reminder of how intensely good it is when it's made properly. The freshly whipped cream, the real stuff, made me swoon.

The nice part of the supper was meeting all of the good people who supported this cause. Most of the people there were members of the UU congregation, which out-hips even my own Episcopal denomination. I was impressed at how many showed up, not because they know anybody gay or lesbian (though I suppose that they must; they are Unitarians, after all). No, they were there because this is simply matter of social justice, and when it comes to doing social justice, nobody beats the Unitarians. And if can combine social justice with a really good potluck, so much the better! 

So I had a pleasant time networking and meeting people and attending the talent show that followed the supper. The congregation figured that if they were going to ask for money for the supper, they would give us all our money's worth, so they arranged ofr various parishioners to sing and play guitar and piano and belt out Broadway tunes. Though the degree of talent was variable, I was, as I always am, astonished at how much talent exists in an average church congregation. One young guy -- he couldn't have been out of high school -- played original tunes on his guitar; another sang some showstoppers from Guys and Dolls; another, a folksinger in his 60s, sang some classic oldies. Maine is chock-full of talent, and I sometimes wonder why. Is it the long winters, and the fact that everybody lives in a small town? If you want a concert, you have to arrange it yourself? Not having access to the professionalism that a bigger city would offer means that folks aren't shy about singing and playing themselves? No matter. It was just a great night.

In Praise of Peg Bracken

Peg Bracken died fairly recently, something I learned while surfing the 'Net. As a writer, it's unlikely that she's known to many readers. In a fairer world, she would be recognized as a great American humorist. But she wrote women's humor, and wrote it in venues that didn't lend here the same kind of audience that, say, Erma Bombeck got. Her best-selling book was a 1960s kitchen primer called The I Hate to Cook Book (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960), written for housewives who were stuck at home in the kitchen and didn't want to be there. In some ways, it's an interesting counterpart to something like The Feminine Mystique because it operates from the same general principle: it asks of women, Am I really going to be fulfilled by cleaning house and raising children, the way society is organized to make me think? Is this really all there is?

As a cookbook, it's sort of dubious, designed to get a woman in and out of the kitchen with a minimum of fuss, and it is clearly sold on the big food conglomerates' stranglehold on the American household of the time. Recipes rely heavily on processed food, condensed soups, Ritz crackers, casseroles, and the like. But you don't read it because it's a great cookbook -- in fact, it would probably make a typical contemporary foodie cringe. No, you read it because it's so hilarious. Bracken is one of the funniest writers out there, and she's an excellent prose stylist to boot. Here's a bit from her opening:

Some women, it is said, like to cook.

This book is not for them.

This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater pans around a dry martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.

When you hate to cook, life is full of jolts: for instance, those ubiquitous full-color double-page spreads picturing what to serve on thise little evenings when you want to take it easy. You're flabbergasted. You wouldn't cook that much food for a combination Thanksgiving and Irish wake. (Equally discouraging is the way the china always matches the food. You wonder what you're doing wrong; because whether you're serving fried oysters or baked beans, your plates always have the same old blue rims.) . . .

These recipes have not been tested by experts. That is why they are valuable. Experts in their sunny spotless kitchens can make anything taste good. But even we can make these taste good. (ix; xi)

I love her attitude. You have better things to do, and if your family is going to riffle through what you prepared in twenty seconds flat, why bother? This is the first cookbook to admit straight off that many of the recipes aren't very exciting, "just like the recipes are in other cokbooks, but the other cookbooks don't admit it" (4). Even the recipes are funny. One chicken dish calls for white wine, and Bracken instructs that one mix the wine in a stove-based sauce only after having "a small snort for medicinal purposes." She also includes household hints, culled from a personal collection of 10,000, and her attitude toward them is unusually smart. She admits that most household hints are "pretty terrible," and here's why:

It isn't that they don't mean well, you understand; because they do. It's just that they operate on the grim premise that everything is a problem. If you did everything that they tell you to do, you'd never have time to make the beds. ((140-41)

Her attitude toward entertaining is likewise practical. (In a nutshell, don't accept dinner invitations because you will have to return them. Instead, throw potlucks; and I must say, her potluck recipes are quite good.) But because you won't listen, you will accept and then have to invite them back. Her best advice is this: "Actually, eight company menus are quite enough. If you find you are serving the same thing too often to the same people, then invite someone else instead. It is much easier to change your friends than your recipes" (72).

And when you actually are entertaining? "This is as good a place as any to digress briefly into the gay mad aspects of the container department, of what you serve things in. For example, the clever hostess often serves her cookies in a brandy snifter! This would seem to leave her cooky jar to serve her brandy in, but then a lively party is probably what she's after" (154).

I know that I'm not doing Bracken justice by quoting her out of context, but this really is one the funniest cookbooks ever written. Despite her very light touch, she is actually practical as all get-out. I'm not sure that I would have liked to grown up eating in her household, though I think that most of us who had mothers her age did so, but I would've loved to grown up with her running the household. And some of the recipes are actually quite good. Casseroles may have a bad pedigree for those of us who now spend vast amounts on organic arugula, but they have their place. Her cooky recipes are unusually good if you're busy like me and bake cookies, say, once a decade. This is mostly because of her stern requirements for a recipe's inclusion: it must call for no exotic ingredients, must be easy, must never call for any rolling out and cutting, must produce extremely good cookies, and lots of them (113). Got all that? This is my kind of baker.

Bracken wrote pretty prolifically. There is an appendix to the cookbook, Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book, which is more of the same, putting everything in that she admits she left out of the original; The I Hate to Housekeep Book which is one of the smartest books I've ever read on that dreary topic; a primer on manners and etiquette, I Try to Behave Myself; a collection of essays, I Didn't Come Here to Argue, drawn from magazine articles she'd published. Though my snippets don't really demonstrate this as well as I'd like, Bracken is a superb stylist, writing the kind of prose that I'd like to pull off. I suspect that she never hit the big time because of her subject matter. Though Erma Bombeck struck gold writing about household drudgery, she also got syndicated early on, which Bracken did not. Furthermore, Bracken never challanged the status quo. She never argued that women shouldn't be in the home, and the underlying permise of her work is that her job is to keep her man happy and fed. At the same time, her works are feminist in outlook. Housework isn't fun or enjoyable for many women, she says pointedly, but it can be manageable. If this is your lot in life, and it's not a very good one, don't waste a lot of time on it.

I expect also that she wrote how-to books because everything in the culture was designed to make women feel insecure about everything that they did. No matter how hard you work, the house is never going to look like those in magazine spreads, the children will yell and right no matter what, and oh, by the way, you weigh too much too. Bracken struck back brilliantly by saying what lots of women needed to hear: you don't need to clean the house nearly as often as people want you to think you do, and spend as much time on cooking as it gives you pleasure, which is probably very little.

But really, the best reason to read her is that she's so funny. I have found any number of her books over the years at various used bookstores, and she's worth hunting down in your public library -- though I would guess that her now dated works have likely long been withdrawn. No matter; find her any way you can, and start laughing.