Baked beans

Today I am making Boston Baked beans in my great grandmother's bean pot. It was later used by my grandmother and finally by my mother before it ended up in my hands. It is not just a meal but a journey through three centuries of personal, regional and national history.

I wish the bean pot could talk and tell me all the conversations that might have been held over the regular Saturday night dinners, where the beans were staple. I can imagine they might have mentioned:

• The election of Grover Cleveland in 1892
• The first World Series in 1903
• The flu epidemic and the barn full of coffins down the street in 1918. The coffins disappeared all too fast.
• The depression in 1929
• My mother's elopement in 1940 
• Pearl Harbor 1941
• My Uncle Gordon's death and my birth 1942 

As a child I remember the discussion of world events and family plans as we eat the Saturday night beans. The pleasure knowing dessert was a blueberry pie made with blueberries my brother and I had picked that afternoon from the patch next to the house. Saturday night dinners were often followed by the family playing games that varied over the decades until I left home at 20.

Along with the bean pot I have a copy of my Grandmother's New England Yankee Cookbook published in 1939 by Coward McCann of New York. It says it is "An Anthology of INCOMPARABLE RECIPES FROM THE SIX NEW ENGLAND STATES and a Little Something about the People whose Traditions for Good Eating is herein permanently recorded BY IMOGENE WOLCOTT from the Files of Yankee Magazine and from Time-worn Recipes Books and many Gracious Contributors."

A bit of history is thrown in along with recipes using cornmeal, an early staple. There's a Boston style clam chowder recipe from the still existent Parker House where my brother was conceived.

Mrs. George W.P Babb of Roslindale, MA contributed her recipe for Cape Cod chicken and more important for dumplings, a recipe I've used often through the years.

There are recipes for brown bread, which I am tempted to make as well as Johnny Cake that goes back to the Puritans. There's a Johnnycake Lane in Chelsea, VT.

I think this fall, I will cook many more of the recipes, not just for the nostalgia, but because the food is plain good.