On Wednesdays We Eat Bean Soup
On Wednesdays We Eat Bean Soup
Scones on Fogo Island
Perched atop a hill near the easternmost edge of the world, the 29-room Fogo Island Inn is an architectural marvel and a beacon for Newfoundland food, art, culture, and most of all, hospitality. The craggy, defiant topography surrounding the inn is equally jaw dropping.
“Farley Mowat,” a Canadian writer and environmentalist, “has said that this is a land where the wheel has no utility,” says Zita Cobb, who moved back home to Fogo Island to help launch the Inn and, more importantly, the Shorefast Foundation, a charity whose mandate is the economic well-being of the local community.
The days here begin with a pre-breakfast of local berry-studded scones, hot coffee, and cool cream, delivered to my door at sunrise while I’m still in bed looking out at and listening to the raging Atlantic.
On Fogo, the food is deeply traditional, intensely delicious, and there’s a signature dish for every day of the week. Alf Coffin, a farmer, fisherman, and talented harmonica player, explains that “Sunday is Cooked Dinner: salt beef and potatoes, cabbage, peas pudding, steam pudding, and you’d have gravy.” Mondays you’d have what’s leftover from Sunday, Tuesday is Jigg’s Dinner, where the same thing is in the cooking pot as Sunday’s Cooked Dinner, “but a Jigg’s dinner has no gravy.” Wednesday is baked beans or bean soup, and you’ll have bread and molasses with every meal. And on it goes.
These acutely local dishes are still being interpreted today: caribou, cod, lobster, foraged moss, kelp, berries and molasses, turned into breakfast staples like granola with Fogo Island berries and caribou moss. All of it from the island, and of the island.