Ray came by the office the other day with a jar in his hand. “Taste these,” he demanded. “I got them at the bean supper last night.” The jar contained a few spoonfuls of baked beans. We tasted. Canned, we judged, with some chopped onion added.

“Right,” Ray said with a sigh. “You know, I’ve been going to bean suppers all over the place this year, and a real bean-hole baked bean is getting hard to find. I’m afraid the art’s dying out.”

It won’t as long as Kevin Dunham and the Maine Forest and Logging Museum in Leonard’s Mills have anything to say about it. For the past couple of years, Dunham, the facility’s caretaker, has been offering lessons in baked-bean cookery at various museum events.

The museum, actually a small village located on a dirt road inside the University of Maine’s experimental forest in Bradley, just across the Penobscot River from Orono, seeks to recreate the flavor of woods work in Maine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Every time we have an event, people are interested in learning about cooking beans,” Dunham says. “The older people have a lot of memories of them, and the younger people are really freaked out when they discover that we’re not kidding, the beans really do come out of the ground.”

The museum maintains a special rock-lined bean pit large enough to hold its five oversized cast-iron bean pots. While a third of a cord of hardwood blazes away in the pit, Dunham leads his lessons for small groups of baked-bean fans. The recipe is no secret: eleven pounds of dried yellow-eye beans, two cups of molasses, one cup of brown sugar, five tablespoons each of dry mustard and salt, two teaspoons of black pepper, two pounds of salt pork, and two large onions for each pot.

Dunham soaks his beans for no more than two hours, then parboils them with the other ingredients for two or three more hours before raking the coals out of the pit and burying the pots of beans. “We put them in at 3 P.M. on one day and take them out between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M. the next day,” he says. “They don’t last long, and people tell me canned beans never taste the same to them afterwards.”

(Published September 1997)