Backseat - From Where I Sit

February 2006

By: Michelle

Peaches and Baked Beans

What do you get when you drop a Georgia peach smack in the middle of Boston Baked Beans? Well, you don’t have to be Julia Child to know that what you end up with is quite a mess. Which is exactly what I got 15 years ago when this GA peach ventured far from her roots and entered the strange land of Boston Baked Beans territory.

It was my first venture out of the south and even before I left the open road I noticed subtle changes happening. The GA signs proclaiming “$50 fine for throwing trash on highway” suddenly became “littering is prohibited $150 dollar fine” around NJ turnpike area and ultimately it became “Disposal of rubbish on roadway is prohibited $250 fine” I quickly learned two things: 1) Fines are more expensive in the north and 2) They are probably more expensive to pay for all the extra space needed for those big words.

You may wonder…what does that have to do with baked beans and peaches? Well, if you look very carefully at a baked bean, you will see that the outside is hard and smooth. It is specially prepared, tempered for hours in a hot oven - it’s a very formal food item, whereas the peach is kind of soft squishy and fuzzy – much more casual. In fact it comes straight from nature to you. If you think about it, that is the key to the entire puzzle of the north vs. the south: Formal new Englanders like a lot of words to make things more formal, while Southerners want it plain and natural. That’s whole reason southern “shopping carts” become “grocery carriages” in the north, southern “car tags” become northern “license plates” and what is “mighty nice” in Georgia becomes “wicked good!” in Massachusetts.

The total irony of this situation is that though northerners use bigger words, they use fewer letters of the alphabet to achieve this. Namely, they don’t use the letter “R”. Bostonians “pak the ca in havad yad.” This was very confusing to a GA girl whose 7th grade teacher turned the letter R into a 2-syllable masterpiece when she used to say, if you don’t quiet down you will be “S”-“O”-“R-ah”-“R-ah”-“Y”. In fact, I was completely baffled when my co-worker I had always heard called “Mac” was wearing a nametag proclaiming he was “Mark”. It took him hours to convince me that he wasn’t wearing a stolen name tag.

It’s not only the exterior that separates the peaches from the baked beans. Let’s look at the inside. If you squish a baked bean what do you get – squished bean. Even though the exterior is formal, the interior is pretty simple – there’s nothing there but squish. However, if you squish a soft peach you will find a hard little surprise inside - the pit. How sneaky and deceptive of the peach. (We call it southern charm).

It was this complicated southern charm that allowed this GA peach to survive in a sea of simple baked beans. You see, my accent came with a lot of assumptions. For example, a waitress once felt the need to explain to me that what she was presenting to me was indeed food. She further explained that just because it was under a lid, I could still eat it. Initially comments like that bruised my delicate peach skin but I quickly learned how to fight back using good old southern charm.

Case and point – I was a part time employee of a group home for mentally challenged patients. One day the stove quit working. A technician came to fix it. He had never been more than 50 miles outside of Boston in his life and was quite amused by my “cute little accent”. He said that my mother must be really proud of me for moving away from the south. When he was finished fixing the stove, he asked me if I knew how to light the gas oven - Boston baked bean mindset. I told him sure “you go outside chop up some fire wood, stack it in the oven and stoke it till it lights” - GA peach pit to the head. He said “no, you just light the pilot”. Baked bean didn’t even know he’d been hit.

Not being one to leave well enough alone, I decided to have some more fun with Mr. Baked Bean. Its not entirely my fault, you see he asked for it when he asked me if we grew a lot of watermelons. So I just had to tell him “yes, that’s how you could tell who was rich. It was the folks with the biggest watermelon patch.” But my greatest feat – the thing that would truly make my momma proud was when I convinced this poor soul that grits were animals that traveled in herds. They could only be hunted during grit season and that if he ever ventured down south, he needed to be sure to ask if grits were in season. If they were, he needed to order them medium rare.

So it may truly be that you can’t mix baked beans and peaches in the same dish. But if each is respected for its own unique flavor, a recipe for disaster could turn into a meal to remember!

Thanks for visiting VirginiaWind.

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