“Bean Porridge Hot”

No supper was so good as the thick bean porridge, flavored with a small bit of salt pork, that Ma dipped onto the tin plates when Pa had come home cold and tired from his hunting. -Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 20, “A Scream in the Night”

     
An early clapping game, “Bean Porridge Hot” is played in the Little House books by the children as a way to keep warm and pass the time, clapping hands and legs in time with the chanted rhyme, faster and faster. The quick movements were exercise, and by using different clapping sequences, the game could become quite difficult and also served as memory work. Notice that in On the Banks of Plum Creek (see Chapter 37, “The Long Blizzard”), young Carrie Ingalls merely holds up her hands for Ma to clap against; she is perhaps too young to remember what to do.

There were many variations to the rhyme: bean porridge, pease porridge, or pease pudding, although there are botanical differences between peas and beans. Pease is the mass plural of pea, meaning uncounted. You just measure them by the cupful or handful or scoop full. Any dried legume may be used, but as Caroline Ingalls typically made bean soup from white navy beans, these were probably what she used to make bean porridge, a bean soup thickened with corn meal and flavored with meat.

BEAN PORRIDGE. Take one quart of dried beans or peas and add to four gallons of water. Add two or three pounds of beef or pork, put them into an iron pot or kettle and boil them together until the meat is thoroughly cooked. Take out the meat and thicken the liquid with Indian meal, and you have porridge. — Nathaniel Bouton, The History of Concord (Concord: Benning W. Sanborn, 1856), 520.

BEAN PORRIDGE. Four pounds of beef and one of salt pork; one pint of dry white beans, four tablespoonfuls of corn meal, pepper and salt to taste. Soak the beans over night. In the morning parboil in fresh water with a pinch of soda till soft. Put the beef and pork in cold water, skim carefully, and simmer four or five hours, or until tender. Take out and cut into two-inch pieces, and remove the bone and gristle; also the fat from the liquor. Put the meat and beans into the meat liquor, and simmer very slowly three or four hours, or till most of the beans are broken. Half an hour before serving stir in the meal, first wetting it in cold water to a smooth paste. The meal should thicken the porridge to about the consistency of a thick soup. The meat should be cooked till it falls apart. Season to taste with salt and pepper. — Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln, Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 287.

     

bean-porridge hot / Bean Porridge Hot (LHP 20, BPC 37)
     “Bean porridge hot, bean porridge cold”
     “Some like it hot, some like it cold”

bean porridge (LHP 20)