EDDINGTON, Maine — In the grey pre-dawn light, throwing armfuls of wood on the fire he kindled in a hole just outside the Eddington-Clifton Civic Center, Josh Parda had one thing on his mind: baked beans.
But not any old kind of baked bean. Parda, 35, was on a mission last Friday morning to make gallons of sweet, savory bean-hole beans the old-fashioned way — by baking them for hours in cast-iron pots buried in the ground.
“Fire, coals and cast iron or earthenware pots. It’s a pretty easy way to cook a whole bunch of food for a whole bunch of people,” he said. “And relative to a can of beans, they taste very much better.”
Making bean-hole beans is a Maine food tradition that is woven into the state’s history and heritage. Still, many folks these days may only have seen the cooking technique demonstrated at places such as the Common Ground Fair in Unity, the Maine Forest and Logging Museum at Leonard’s Mills in Bradley or at the occasional bean-hole bean supper. That’s too bad, according to Parda and other fans of the culinary specialty, which demands a lot of work and firewood at the outset and then a lot of patience while waiting for the heat to work its magic on the buried pots of beans.
The County is pleased to feature content from our sister company, Bangor Daily News. To read the rest of “Digging into tradition with bean-hole beans,” an article by contributing Bangor Daily News staff writer Abigail Curtis, please follow this link to the BDN online.
