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Dear friends, I know that I promised you pie recipes tonight, Accidental and On-Purpose Pies, but I don’t want to put everyone into a sugar coma in my first week back.  I have retrieved my Sherry Yard book and will be able to share tomorrow, honestly.  In the meantime, I thought it was time to give the savories their due.  Behold.

Or, rather, behold after I do a bit of whorish self-promotion New pictures of Eureka Springs are up, right here.

Cafe Main Street is a diner, country-kitchen-style as opposed to O’Mahoney-style.  Across the street is the Auditorium.  Second City plays next week, Leon Russell after July 4th weekend, Ani DiFranco at the end of August.  I have been thinking all week of beans and cornbread.  As you drive into Eureka Springs you begin to see signs on the highway:  FRIED CHICKEN.  CATFISH.  BEANS AND CORNBREAD.  BEANS AND CORNBREAD.  BEANS AND CORNBREAD. You see a sign more than three times, and you begin to ask questions.

I have yet to determine whether this is an all-over the midwest dish, or an all-over-the-south dish, or just where the idea of pairing beans and cornbread started.  I wonder how many variant forms of beans are served, and where to find them.  From what the Colony staff tells me, around here the beans are brown beans, a/k/a baked beans.  I’ve spent days in my room , fixing frittatas for lunch, feeling peckish around 3 p.m., wondering if beans and cornbread would be too filling for low tea.  I decide that they are.

Saturday, June 19 is my first Saturday in Eureka.  I decide to ride the trolley into town, taking advantage of the chance to see the other side of the Historic District Loop, a change of pace from the flat stretch of Spring Street I’ve been walking for three days.  We ride up the winding part of Spring to the Crescent Hotel, and back down Prospect to a new set of candybox homes, including one with a sour cherry tree out front.  I want to hop off the trolley and offer cold hard cash to the owner of that tree for those promising, glistening cherries.  We pass a monster-sized ‘cue shack called Bubba’s; I inhale deeply and remind myself to not be taken in by the first hit of smoke I find, but to wait and get a recommendation from the trolley driver (which, it turns out, we are not supposed to do).  Even in a strange place 1,300 miles from home, I am a stubborn fresser.

There is a quandary when I arrive at the diner.  Beans and cornbread are not considered breakfast, and lunch service doesn’t begin until 11.  “Let me ask him,” the waitress says, and disappears into the kitchen before I can say no, that’s all right, look!  you have biscuits and sausage gravy!  Ham and redeye gravy!  Grits!  But she comes back and says, “He must love me this morning, because he says they’re ready to go.” Five minutes later, out comes my breakfast, and ohhhh, I’ll never finish that big bowl of beans!  They are soupy beans, lots of bean liquor, little bits of lean bacon in them.  The cornbread has the telltale bottom crust of cast-iron baking, and a dark pecan-colored just-shy-of-burnt caramelized top.  I nibble at it.  If this is a mix, I do not want to know.  It tastes like the real thing, sweet stone-ground yellow cornmeal, egg, milk, and yes, a little sugar, which normally I can’t abide, but here there’s just enough to enhance the cornmeal’s sweetness, and to plane off the bitter edge of the hull.  The beans are full of that dark savory-sweet brownness that I love in baked beans.  These beans are not quite as sweet as my beloved State O’Maine baked beans I get in Vermont, but they do make a good foil for the cornbread.  I don’t know if what I’m doing is acceptable beans and cornbread etiquette, but I crumble the cornbread into the bowl, mix it into the bean liquor, and I eat that whole big beautiful bowl.  I will not be hungry again for another eight hours.  When the waitress takes my bowl ("get that out of your way, hon?"), I say to her, “I didn’t think I had a whole bowl in me, but --” and here she and I say in unison, in identical tones of wide-eyed pleasure, “they’re reaaal good.”