Fillet

Brown Bread,
Baked Beans

Jim Frew

Illustration: Luke Knowland

Our brown bread story began in the canned-food aisle of the Sentry Market in Garberville, California, a one-supermarket town. Now Garberville may be small, but it's still much bigger than Blocksburg, our final destination and the hometown of my friend Kristin W. Compared to the suburban sprawl of my youth, Blocksburg is just a rise in the road - the exact geographical center of nowhere.

I mean this, of course, in the best possible way: No city, no noise, just some people, some cows and a whole lot of quiet. This tiny mountain village boasts a post office (Kristin's mom is the postmaster), a few houses and barns, but no supermarkets.

A handful of us were making our monthly trip to Casterlin School to teach the kids there how to make Web pages. One of the teachers at Casterlin, Marc Wilson, and his wife April, put us up in their family cabin. This cabin's great. It's on a 40-acre parcel of land, up a dirt road, across a wooden bridge, through a locked gate, and up a very steep, very long driveway. It doesn't have electricity, but it does have a gas stove and a gravity-fed water system. Heaven. About seven miles beyond the middle of nowhere. Absolute heaven.

Our crew was almost equally divided between East Coasters and West Coasters with a midwesterner or two thrown in for good measure. Over the campfire the night before, we were talking about brown bread. The Left Coasters thought the East Coasters were crazy. Bread cooked in a can? That's crack smokin' crazy talk. The last place they ever expected to find this "brown bread" stuff was at the Sentry Market in Garberville, but there it was, right next to the canned baked beans. Their theory that if brown bread did in fact exist, it had to be some weird East Cost phenomenon, was completely shattered.

I'm not really sure what those dozen cans of brown bread were doing in the Sentry Market, but beans and brown bread were staples in my folks' home in Boston. Hot dogs, baked beans, and brown bread made a great Saturday night supper, but none of it was from a can. We stopped having beans from a can in the 70s when Mom grew out of the cool-casserole-things-you-can-make-out-a can-of-mushroom-soup phase and progressed to the its-time-for-healthy- natural-food-lets-make-our-own-pickles phase. Anyway, an instant food-flavor memory flashback happened in the can goods aisle in Garberville. We bought a few cans to take up to the cabin for the West Coasters to sample, but it just wasn't the same as Mom's.

When we got back to San Francisco, I called dear ol' Mom and asked her to send me the recipe, which arrived in a big cardboard box the following week. Included in the box were three empty coffee cans for cooking the bread. These apparently originated from my aunt and uncle who wondered why the hell I couldn't just buy a can of coffee at the supermarket, but sent them along just the same. (Just so you know, Aunt Peg, Spinelli's doesn't sell coffee in a can, but thanks for the cans and saving me from two weeks of Chock Full O'Nuts.)

The night before our next trip to Blocksburg, I set out to make some real brown bread for my West Coast friends. The process isn't hard, but it does take a long time - a lot of time if you factor in the trip to Target to get a pot big enough to steam three coffee cans at a time. Here's the recipe: 1 cup whole wheat flower 1 cup all-purpose flour 1 cup yellow cornmeal 2 teaspoons baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups buttermilk 2/3 cups molasses 1 cup raisins (or currants)

Butter an empty 45 oz. juice can (I double the recipe and use three coffee cans). Cut a circle of wax paper, butter it and put it in the bottom of the can. Put a large pot with a few inches of water on the stove and bring it to a boil.

Combine the dry ingredients. Stir in the buttermilk, molasses and raisins (the last time I made it, I used currants and I think I used a lot more than a cup). Pour the mixture in the can, but leave some room at the top because it'll rise. Cover the top of the can with foil and secure it with string. Put it in the pot and cover it with a lid. Steam the bread for three hours. Remove the can from the water and let it rest for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and string. Squeeze and shake the bread out of the can like you would canned cranberry sauce. Cut off a slice and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Wrap the rest in foil and impress your friends. It's great warm out of the can with some butter, the next morning with coffee, or the next day with dinner.

Baked Beans
Until our visit to the cabin, I never would have considered eating brown bread without beans. I still haven't made the beans myself yet, but I did have my mom fax me the recipe so I could share it with you. For some reason, Mom made Boston baked beans in a pressure cooker on top the stove. The whole line about brick-oven flavor is crap. You just need some fresh ingredients and a pressure cooker. I, however, don't own a pressure cooker, so I haven't made these beans myself, but giving you just the recipe for the brown bread alone would have been somehow incomplete and wrong. Itchy without Scratchy, Mutt without Jeff. So here it is:

2 lbs navy beans
1/4lbs salt pork
2 tsp dry mustard
1tps salt
1 cup molasses
1 cup sugar
1 med onion chopped
i onion whole, peeled

Sort the beans. OK, it's not really sorting - just look through them to make sure there aren't any little rocks or mutant beans. Then rinse the beans, and par boil them for 30 minutes. Take them off the heat and mix in 1/2 tsp. of baking soda (I think this was supposed to demolish the gaseous quality of baked beans in the pre-Beano days). Stir well. Drain the beans in a colander, and rinse in cold water. Mix together the sugar, molasses, mustard, and chopped onion with 4 cups of hot water. Add the drained, par boiled beans. Dump it all in the pressure cooker. Submerge the salt pork rind side up in the bean mixture, then sink the onion too. Pressure cook for 20 minutes at 15 lbs. of pressure. Start counting the 20 minutes when the pot starts whistling. When it's finished, take it off the burner and leave it for four hours. Let the pressure go down naturally. Eat the beans with hot dogs, preferably from the grill, and the brown bread.

There is one variation to this recipe that you should know about, and that is Mrs. Babineau's variation. Mrs. Babineau, the mother of my big sister's best friend from childhood, used to make baked beans that were closer to a dessert than a side dish. They were really really sweet, and the kids loved them. Sugar, go figure. I don't have her recipe, but if you sub in 2 cups of real maple syrup for the sugar and molasses, you'll get what is known in our house as Mrs. Babineau's baked beans.