On Vineyard, family history is full of beans
For Cynthia Riggs, Boston baked beans are more than a dish. They're family history. "My mother always talked about my great-grandmother making Boston baked beans," recalls Riggs, a 13th-generation Islander, as residents of Martha's Vineyard prefer to be called. "It's a traditional New England thing. Every family I can think of would have baked beans on Saturday night, and each person would have his or her own recipe."
The advantage of the weekly routine, says Riggs, is twofold. Not only can folks count on a tasty dish, the all-day cooking warms the house. "In the olden days you'd have the wood stove going all day, so it was all sort of economical." A staple at church suppers, baked beans also made for festive parties, usually accompanied by brown bread and franks. "The beans are all done ahead of time, the house smells good, and the guests don't have to go oohing and aahing over this fancy dish, because it's familiar," says Riggs, whose 18th-century West Tisbury home, Cleaveland House, is a bed and breakfast for artists and writers. "As a result your table conversation is good conversation. People will say, 'These beans are delicious,' but that's it. Nobody feels the poor host or hostess has knocked herself out." Plus, she notes, the weekend routine led to a weekday treat: sandwiches of mashed leftover beans, spread between slices of buttered bread.
Riggs's recipe, handed down through generations, varies slightly from some traditional takes in that it uses both molasses and brown sugar. Some folks, she says, sweeten only with molasses, keeping the dish to the bare staples that the seafaring Islanders would have had on hand. Other than that, the dish is simplicity itself: Salt pork, ground mustard, an onion, salt, and beans. Riggs, unable to find a steady supply of her mother's favorite yellow-eye beans, uses navy beans in the family bean pot. (A Dutch oven or casserole is a fine substitute for the glazed ceramic bean pot). But no ketchup -- ever: "New Englanders don't use tomatoes," says Riggs.
If this dish sounds familiar, it may be because Riggs immortalized it in her first mystery, "Deadly Nightshade." The 2001 novel introduced amateur detective Victoria Trumbull, a spunky nonagenarian who, the author admits, resembles her own mother, Dionis Coffin Riggs (named for Dionis Coffin, who settled Nantucket).
"My mother was a very strong New Englander and a marvelous poet, and she died [in 1997] when she was almost 99. I figured I couldn't get away with that, so I made [Victoria] much younger, merely 92. Clearly it's my attempt to keep my mother alive. I lived with her the last 10 years of her life, so I know how she would react under certain circumstances. So [Victoria] has integrity of personality. My mother was quite vain, not about her appearance, but about her ability to get around and do things -- and she loved the idea of getting involved. She'd have been thrilled to be a detective."
And undoubtedly happy to know that her daughter still makes her beans the traditional way. 