Week 49 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is “Family Recipe.”
My dad, rest his soul, wasn’t a big contributor to household chores. Mom did all the cleaning and cooked most of the meals. Dad could grill like a pro though! He learned how to marinate meat and grilled up the most tender and juicy marinated steaks you could ever eat. Grilling became his one infrequent, albeit excellent cooking task...until the beans.
Dad and his beans. His damn baked beans... My mom, brother, and I had a love-hate relationship with them.
Dad had a tendency to spontaneously pick up new hobbies and just as spontaneously drop them. We don’t know what prompted him to make homemade beans or where he found the recipe, but he tried his hand at it, and like grilling, he was great at it. He began by soaking the beans the night before, and slow cooked them for much of the following day in a crock-pot. He always left a terrific mess in his wake, dirtying just about every dish in the house, much to Mom’s annoyance. He did make fantastic beans though, and like all of his hobbies, became obsessed with it. He spent months perfecting his recipe, constantly tweaking it until it was just right.
At first he made beans just for us. We ate so many beans! When his recipe was just about perfect, he expanded his audience.
For the first time probably ever, he started coming to our Saturday lunch gathering with my mom’s family, affectionately known as “Soup Day,” and brought his beans. He was showered with compliments and there’s nothing Dad liked more than praise. He thrived on it! I say this with love and amusement more than criticism: he was a vain man. He was physically incapable of walking by a mirror, a store window – any reflective surface -- without stopping to admire himself. When others admired him for something, he kept doing whatever it was over and over again for the positive attention. He was never shy about fishing for compliments either. “Do you like my beans? What do you think of them? I added more molasses. Are they good?”
He started making beans for our immediate family every week. Do you know how long an entire crock-pot of beans lasts for a family of four when eaten as a side dish? Days! The better part of the week! If he was free for Soup Day, he made an extra batch, and we kept our fingers crossed that our extended family ate them all. The last thing we wanted was Dad bringing home the leftovers! No matter how much you love a certain food, if you eat it too often, you grow tired of it. It got to that point with the beans. We had them as a side dish four or five nights each and every week for months on end. Sometimes for lunch on the weekend my dad would insist on beans and hotdogs. The three of us became utterly sick of them. The only person who hadn’t lost enthusiasm for them was Dad!
Being sick of eating beans was only one aspect of our family’s bean-burnout. We were also disgusted by the smell. Not of the beans. Even when we were tired of eating them, the rich aroma of the molasses and sugar wafting through the house was heavenly. We couldn’t handle Dad’s bean-farts anymore. I think if the military knew how potent my father’s farts were, they would have recruited him to a top-secret torture squad. They’d use his ass-poison to make prisoners “spill the beans” – BA-DUM-Tsssss! His farts were legendary! After grocery shopping, he’d double over with laughter telling us that he stealthily dropped a “silent but deadly” in the store. He always made it to the end of the aisle before it hit, and loved watching the other shoppers shoot accusatory looks of disgust at one another as they hurried away from ground zero. If I was shopping with him, he’d mutter out of the corner of his mouth, “Look straight ahead, and walk fast!” I knew what that meant and did my best to stifle my giggles as we watched from the end of the aisle. We always laughed about it the whole way home! Whenever we were trapped in the car with him and he let one go, he’d snicker, “Must have run over a skunk!” as we rushed to crank our windows open, coughing and retching as we strained against our seatbelts to suck in clean air. Growing up in a paper mill town, our “clean air” often had the thick, rotten-egg smell of sulfur, but man – our Westbrook air smelled like the fresh breeze on a mountaintop compared to Dad. And these farts I’m describing? They were his normal, standard farts. His bean farts were a matter of magnitude worse.
Tired of smelling his farts and eating his beans almost every day for months, we began taking smaller helpings. We moved the tiny portions around our plates reluctantly, forcing down a few only when Dad looked our way. Sometimes we’d try hiding them under other bits of food. When we finally confessed that we liked his beans, but we missed having potatoes, or rice, or noodles, or anything that, you know – wasn’t beans as a side, he got all mad and offended. We were ungrateful! He worked hard making his beans! They were the best beans and so good it was impossible to grow tired of them! I loved the man, but nuance was never quite Dad’s thing. You know how an angry kid will take their toys and petulantly cry, “I’m going home!” Dad kind of did the same thing, but instead of a kid, he was an adult, and instead of his toys, he took his crockpot and vat of molasses. He rarely made his beans after that, and when he did, he served them with a side of snide comments intended to guilt trip us.
It’s been over 30 years since I ate my dad’s beans, and I’m finally ready to have them again. As much as I’ve poked fun at him here, I’d give just about anything to share a bowl of beans and some laughs with Dad. Maybe I’ll make them for my family and let out a few nasty bean farts in his honor. I know that’s crass, but whatever. He’d find it funny.
Without further ado, here’s the recipe:
Gene’s Baked Beans
3 cups of dried navy beans
½ - ¾ lb. lean salt pork,cubed
1 onion, diced
1/3 cup molasses
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsps. dry mustard
½ tsp. pepper
Soak beans overnight
Drain and rinse beans. Add all ingredients to the crockpot
Mix well and cook on low for 8-10 hours or until beans are tender
Comentários