Maine one of last bastions of the venerable bean supper

BIDDEFORD — This is Jeffrey La Riviere’s first bean supper — so far the 14-year-old isn’t impressed.

“I hate beans,” says La Riviere. Small talk, too. But the lady sitting next to him doesn’t. Help.

Lesson: If you don’t like beans and small talk, you may not like bean suppers. If you do, you’re living in the right state. Maine is bean supper country, and the proof is on late-night TV, where endless lists of bean suppers — at churches, granges and Masonic halls from Madawaska to Kittery — go rolling up the screen.

Maine is one of the last strongholds of the bean supper, a Yankee fund-raising tradition founded on that venerable New England food, the baked bean. New Hampshire still has bean suppers, and Vermonters have their own version, the chicken pot pie supper.

But in Massachusetts, the bean supper is pretty much a goner, says Boston Globe Calendar section editor Tom Long, who remembers them in Weymouth, Mass., as a child.

But beans and fellowship still pack them into basements in York County. The bean supper at the Masonic Hall in Biddeford drew mostly Franco-Americans.

Jeffrey La Riviere sits with his grandparents at one of the long tables in the basement, where the supper is held month after month, year after year. Men fly between the tables and the kitchen, plopping big bowls of food in front of diners. There are homemade baked beans — both red kidney and California pea, depending on your preference — and hot dogs, homemade American chop suey, rolls, homemade coleslaw and pickles.

Jeffrey’s grandparents, Harry and Maria Boutet of Saco, have come to this bean supper for 16 years on the fourth Saturday of every month.

“We come for the food,” Maria Boutet, 64, says. “You can sit and eat as much as you want, and talk to people you know.”

A good three-quarters of the crowd are regulars. Elaine Croteau, 49, a Biddeford post office clerk, has been coming for 15 years.

“I like coming because it makes Biddeford seem like a small town again,” Croteau says.

“Tonight I ran into a cousin I hadn’t seen in 15 years. It took coming here to see each other.”

Conversation varies from table to table, but a few subjects reign.

“If you know the people you’re sitting next to, you talk family, work and kids,” says Elaine McMullen, 46, of Biddeford. “If you don’t, usually you start with the weather.”

But no matter what, all roads lead back to one topic: food. There are gluttony jokes and promptings (“Come on Ray, have another helping,”) and always this declaration: “Never in the 10 years that I been comin’ to this supper have I tasted pie near as good as this.”

One subject brings out the righteousness in regulars: Which one is the best bean supper in the country?

“Ours is the only one that has home-baked pie every time,” Paul Peck of the Biddeford Sewer Department says smugly. “We also have the best baked beans.”

Not so, says Nancy Glover of Kennebunk, a cook at Kennebunk High School, in a phone conversation this week.

The best is “the one in West Kennebunk, because of the people and the beans,” says Glover, a regular at the bean supper on the first Saturday of each month at the Masonic Hall in West Kennebunk.

“Ours is the best,” says Betty Morrison, 58, of Waterboro, in another phone call. “We have homemade biscuits, served hot,” Morrison says. Since 1982, she hasn’t missed the bean supper on the second Saturday of the month at the Massabesic Lions Regional Center in Waterboro.

But some bean supper fans love them so much they try them all.

“My husband and I go out to restaurants sometimes,” says Pauline Sylvester, 68, a retired school cafeteria worker from Limington. “But we’re on a fixed income … and you can’t just go out wherever you want these days.

“So when we drive around the state and we see a bean supper, we stop to it. There’s nothing as good a meal as a bean supper. It’s the meetin’ people, and I love the cookin.”‘