Underground fire pits unearth beans' flavor potential

ONE morning a couple of months ago, my friend and frequent co-author Chris Schlesinger called me. “You have to come look at my new bean hole,” he said.
My first reaction was to giggle. Because, really, who wouldn’t?

But after he explained that he was talking about a classic method of outdoor cooking, I figured it was worth checking out. After all, Chris — who some 27 years ago was one of the first East Coast chefs to insist on installing a live fire grill in his restaurant — has a pretty good track record of finding interesting ways to cook with flames.

So I headed over to his house. Sure enough, he had dug a small pit in his backyard (which already features a much larger pit for roasting whole animals), lined it with fire bricks and had a friend fashion a metal cover for it. This, he explained, was his “tricked-out, souped-up, chef’s style” bean hole. And my timing was spot on. Sitting beside the pit was a giant three-legged black cast-iron bean pot that he had just pulled out.

He took off the lid and we both dipped in spoons.

Often, the mere process of cooking with these outdated and labor-intensive methods needs to be its own reward, so I wasn’t expecting all that much. But I was wrong. The long, slow cooking with its gradually declining heat had perfectly melded the earthy flavor of the beans with the fatty richness of the salt pork, the distinctive rounded sweetness of molasses and maple syrup and the gentle tang of mustard. These beans might just be worth all that effort.

But despite this big flavor payoff, I was still curious about what had inspired Chris to actually dig up his yard just to cook some beans. “It was that bean pot,” he said.

Turns out that the pot had been given to him by Sally Church, mother of his girlfriend, Suzanne. Sally Church, in turn, had been given the antique by a friend who thought she was a likely candidate to honor the pot’s history by using it in the traditional way. 

That was a pretty good bet, because Ms. Church has a sterling bean-hole heritage. She grew up in Rangeley, Me., which has a fair claim to be a center of bean-hole cookery. Insofar as a pit in the ground can be said to be an “invention,” various East Coast Native American tribes are credited with it. Among them are the Abenaki, who lived in the region around Rangeley. When Europeans arrived, one of the things they borrowed from the Abenaki was the bean hole.

The technique was particularly suited for Maine’s ubiquitous lumber camps, where cooks didn’t exactly have high-tech equipment. What they did have was plenty of land, lots of rocks to use as heat-retaining devices and a surplus of wood edgings (most often birch) from the lumberyards to use as fuel. Even during log drives down Maine’s rivers, the cooks would head down the river early and dig a bean hole so the beans would be ready by the time the loggers arrived.

Today the bean-hole dinner — those iconic beans accompanied by hot dogs, brown bread, coleslaw, potato salad and corn on the cob — could still give a clambake a run for its money as Maine’s premier celebratory dinner. It’s prime fodder for church suppers and community fund-raisers as well as family gatherings.

Ms. Church, for example, remembers them from Saturday nights at her in-laws’ beach cabin. The men would grill meat and a neighbor by the name of Archie Kerrigan would come over to make bean-hole beans, bringing along a bouquet of radishes for Ms. Church’s mother-in-law. (Admittedly, Mr. Kerrigan, who had a dog named Wimpy to whom he spoke only French, was a classic Down East eccentric.)

But despite all this, Ms. Church never quite got around to digging her own bean hole. So, after Chris repeatedly questioned her about the purpose and provenance of the pot, she presented it to him, hoping that his culinary curiosity would compel him to use it. She was also well aware that Chris is a confirmed fan of outdoor cooking techniques that take a long time and primarily involve sitting around doing not much.

This motivation was an essential factor because, while bean-hole cookery is effective and fun, what it is not is quick.

Here’s how it works: Dig a hole big enough for the pot you’re planning to cook in, then build a fire of hardwood logs in it, dropping a dozen or so rocks into the fire once it’s well started. When the wood has burned down to embers, very carefully take out the rocks using barbecue gloves, put your pot of (presoaked and parboiled) beans into the embers, drop the rocks around and on top of the pot, cover everything with dirt and walk away. Come back in eight hours or so, and your beans should be ready.

Of course, as with other folkway foods like barbecue or chile, there’s plenty of controversy about all this. Because it’s not really done right unless it’s done exactly the way your mama (or your grandma or your great-grandma) did it. And, while you’re at it, there’s lots of discussion to be engaged in about the particular beans you should use. The soldier bean is said to be most authentic, but we’ve found that most heirloom beans, like Jacob’s Cattle or yellow eye, work very well, as do more common types like pea beans or even kidney beans.

Whatever bean you use, once you’ve cooked up a big pot of them, you can try the Maine tradition of next-day sandwiches of cold beans with raw onions on brown bread (or pumpernickel, if that’s easier). It’s one of those “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it” combinations.

Chances are, though, most of us are not going to go out and dig a bean hole, even if we do have a backyard. So it’s fortunate that bean-hole beans can also be made perfectly well in the electric bean hole, a k a the oven. They won’t have bean-hole bona fides and they’ll lack that little trace of smoke, but they will still be very delicious.

In fact, like other commonplace ingredients, beans too often fail to get their culinary due. Prepared with a little care (and bean-hole beans certainly qualify in that regard), they can be as good in their own way as caviar, with subtly distinct, satisfyingly earthy flavors and a texture perfectly pitched between tenderness and chew. 

Since it’s so easy, cooking beans in the oven also provides a good opportunity to explore the fact that beans play well with all kinds of flavor principles. A Mediterranean slant on pork and beans, with pork butt, tomatoes and tangy mustard greens, for example, or a pot of spicy New Orleans-style red beans with chicken and andouille.

I’m sure the Abenaki wouldn’t mind.