I wrote the essay that follows as part of an exercise with my writing group. I realized that it's a piece of family history, so I decided to post it. Jerry's father Frank Horn, a Navy veteran of a Liberty Ship, confirmed that on his ship, he was served beans regularly, but in his case, they were served on Thursdays.
My father was a Navy man during World
War II. He attempted to enlist on December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor. However, the line at the recruiter’s office was so long
that they sent him away until January. After basic training in San Diego, he
went to Navy Pier in Chicago to be trained to become an aviation metalsmith.
In the cold Chicago winter, he caught
pneumonia and lost weight. His uniform sagged on his gangly frame so
dramatically that his buddies wondered whether he was getting enough to eat. He
said that he was. In fact, he said that Navy chow was great.
He was assigned to a CASU, a “Carrier
Air Support Unit” that moved from aircraft carrier to aircraft carrier from
Hampton Roads to San Diego, Hawaii, and Seattle, attending to their aircraft on
board. He ate in mess hall on each ship, or sampled food in civilian venues on
shore. He raved about the salmon in Seattle and the fresh pineapple in Hawaii,
but he found a particular favorite on every ship: Navy beans.
Navy beans are small white “pea beans.”
They are the basis of the famous Senate Bean Soup served every day in cafeteria
in the nation’s capitol: Beans, ham hocks, onion, salt, pepper, and butter. (A
competing recipe for the Senate’s chef included celery, mashed potatoes, garlic
and parsley.)
Navy beans have been a part of the
Navy’s cookbook since at least its 1920s version. The recipe included beans,
salt, molasses (a New England contribution), mustard (a southern contribution),
pepper, salt pork, and onions. The recipe called for soaking the beans in
water, then draining them, mixing them with the seasonings, and layering them
with onions and small bits of salt pork in a cooking pot. Add water just to
cover the beans, and bake for 7 hours, adding water as needed to keep the level
of liquids just over the beans. Actually, the recipe is for stewing the beans
in liquid, not really baking them.
In 1944, three years after my father
joined, and a year before his discharge, the Navy issued a new cookbook. It
suggested serving beans up to twice weekly, but admonishes chefs to vary their
recipe, and to avoid patterns of serving the same dish on the same day every
week. Perhaps that was a response to sailors’ objections to being served Navy
beans every week on Saturday. Never the less, the new manual recommend seasonal
menus, and here are the excerpts:
Spring: Saturday, breakfast, Navy baked beans
Summer:
Wednesday, breakfast, Navy baked beans
Autumn:
Saturday, breakfast, Navy baked beans
Winter:
Saturday, breakfast, Navy baked beans
Bean dishes are international. The
offering of beans for breakfast wasn’t unique to the Navy: A part of the “Full
English breakfast” includes beans, following breads, eggs, meats, and potatoes,
but whether this was followed by the English Navy during Great Britain’s time
of great strife during WW II is another issue.
When my father was discharged from the
Navy, he made no effort to emulate the Navy’s baked bean recipe. He plunked a
can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans into a sauce pan and applied heat until they
were boiling. (Ingredients today: Beans, tomato puree, high fructose corn
syrup, sugar, starch, pork, salt, citric acid, vinegar, oleoresin paprika for
color, and unspecified flavorings.)
One wife and four children later, my
father was still heating up beans for my brother and sisters and me for
breakfast on Saturday. Our older cousin Patty
taught us to sing “Beans, beans, the musical fruit….” Patty called the
beans “Poop seeds.” Misunderstanding her, my siblings and I called them
“poopsies,” and we were referring specifically to Campbell’s Pork and Beans.
It’s true that beans are “poop seeds.”
The fermentation of polysaccharides, which are chemically complex sugars from
beans in the gut, are undigestible and mix with gut flora to create gas. The
best representation of this phenomenon is the scene in the movie “Blazing Saddles,”
where the characters sit around the campfire farting. It’s also true that
“Beano” and its competitors will allow either the digestion of the gut sugars,
or allow the flatus to exit the body easier.
It is also true that beans have been
politicisized as important cultural icons. Elijah Muhammed, the leader of the
Black Muslims, urged his fellow to avoid beans as being representative of the
excesses of the dominant white culture, except for Navy beans, and bean pie (filled
with cooked and mashed beans, eggs, milk, sugar and spices, sold in Muslim
communities at fund-raising events.)
None of my three siblings and I have
developed a persistent taste for beans for breakfast. My two sisters
prefer sleeping in to eating on Saturday
morning. My brother’s breakfast is more likely to be Oreos crushed into vanilla
ice cream and a bottle of Diet Pepsi before he hurries his lanky frame out the
door to the ER, where he is a physician. I prefer my beans unsweetened, but I
do admit to eating leftover white chili for breakfast.
1920 cookbook:
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