Baked beans are as good a food-related excuse as any to post Monty Python’s video of “The Lumberjack Song” from 1969. You may not know that actress Connie Booth, who appears here alongside Python’s Michael Palin, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, or that she retired from acting in 1995 to pursue a career as a psychotherapist.
Allegations of logger cross-dressing aside, we now consider yet another controversial hot take: “One can work harder and longer on pork and beans…than on any other food with which I am acquainted, save bear meat.”
Paula Marcoux gets to the bear bottom of it at Gastro Obscura.
Eat Like a 19th-Century Lumberjack With This Recipe
…The research (in 1902) was part of an early wave of metabolism and digestion studies that would become foundational to the nascent field of Nutrition Science. But it also provides an incredibly detailed portrait of the diets of lumberjacks at the turn of the century. The study’s subjects were Canadian migrants in their late 20s who were supremely physically fit, spending long days doing “severe work under more or less trying conditions,” as the study’s authors put it.
To fuel that intense labor, the loggers had a calorie-rich, protein-packed diet. Beef and pork, fresh or salted—as stews, boiled meat or roasts—and salted fish—cod, herring and salmon—made their rounds through the menus, accompanied by dishes of potatoes, cabbage, and turnips. Hot breads, especially sourdough biscuits, were in constant supply, as well as doughnuts, pies, cakes, and cookies. But when it came to “the most important single article of diet,” the study identified one dish that stood above the rest: baked beans.
How’s this for a coda?
“Baked beans are strong food, ideal for active men in cold weather. One can work harder and longer on pork and beans, without feeling hungry, than on any other food with which I am acquainted, save bear meat. The ingredients are compact and easy to transport; they keep indefinitely in any weather. But when one is only beginning camp life he should be careful not to overload his stomach with beans, for they are rather indigestible until you have toned up your stomach by hearty exercise in the open air.”
— The Book of Camping and Woodcraft: A Guidebook for Those who Travel in the Wilderness, by Horace Kephart
Photo credit: Captured from the preeding video.
