Laudator Temporis Acti

Robert P. Tristram Coffin, quoted in Willan C. Roux, What's Cooking Down in Maine (Camden: Down East Books, 1964), p. 73:

Finally, the sweetening. Here the roads divide. For in New England there are two camps. Everybody is in one or the other. There are no neutrals. The Sweets and the Unsweets. They are bitterly opposed to each other. Blows may be exchanged. No quarter is given. Houses, even, are split in two on this crucial point. Ours was, on the farm. My mother had to bake two different pots of beans every Saturday of her life in the country. There was no compromise possible ... The sweet and the unsweet pots had to be rotated.

If you want to spoil your beans, if you wish to undo all the natural goodness in the universe ... pour in now one half cup of thick molasses, and ruin everything. Join the Sweets and be forever cursed to remain on the lower level of culture. But if, like me, you are one of the Unsweets, put in one tablespoon only of molasses—or, better still, one heaping one of brown sugar. There will be enough to give the thinnest edge of an exquisite suggestion of sweetness which the beans need to be perfect ...

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