As we attempt to research and tell the story of baked beans, we find two such dishes that cannot be overlooked--they are identified with their home regions so strongly that anyone who has ever been to these places knows about the beans. Of course, the most famous is Boston Baked Beans. Lesser known but no less strongly identified with their home state are Maine's Bean-Hole Beans.
Maine Bean-Hole Beans
Never heard of bean-hole beans? You've never been to Maine. (I haven't either.) I ran across the recipe originally on some e-mail list and kept it for future reference. Today, I happened on that file and read the recipe again. After reading it, I thought, "There must be more to this story." Off I went to my trusty Google search engine, where a quick search for "Maine bean hole" brought up over 3,000 listings. The first ones were the recipe itself, which has been replicated across the Web many times-you can tell it's usually from the same source, because one of the instructions refers to the "bean bean pot." The same error appears in a half-dozen instances of this recipe around the Web. (My version will fix it.)
Thousands of the listings, after the first twenty or so, are for "bean-hole suppers," often put on by fire departments, chambers of commerce, and similar organizations. Apparently, any community event in Maine is likely to involve a bean-hole dinner. From this evidence, I conclude that Maine bean-hole beans are, indeed, a well-known and well-beloved tradition in Maine.
So What Are Bean-Hole Beans?
The early Native Americans in Maine (the Penobscot Indians, according to one source) cooked in holes in the ground for hundreds of years. The early settlers learned to make a special baked bean dish from the Penobscots. The beans are so good that people still go to the trouble to dig fire pits and bury bean pots overnight to cook them.
How Do You Make a Bean Hole?
Here's one description of bean-hole cooking:
I dug a pit about thirty inches deep and put a cast iron manhole cover in the bottom. Then I lined the sides with cast-iron wheels...window-sash weights...rocks...and finished the top with bricks. Now I can fire it up with a couple of basket loads of wood for two, two-and-a-half hours, then shovel it out, put the beans in [covering them with coals and dirt to seal the hole], and cook them from 12 to 20 hours. (Robert Campbell of Glenburn, Maine, quoted by the Maine Folklife Center website.)
