"Pirates, Whales, Wrecks, and Salvage" sounds like the title of a swashbuckling adventure novel, but in fact it is the topic of the next lecture in the 350th Anniversary series. Noel Gish's talk, subtitled "East Hampton's Maritime History," will take place at Guild Hall on Friday, March 27.

The speaker, who heads the Historic Advisory Board of the Town of Smithtown, teaches history at Hauppauge High School. Mr. Gish is a trustee of the Smithtown Historical Society and of the Suffolk County Historical Society, and the author of "Smithtown, 1660-1929: Looking Back Through the Lens."

His lecture, which has been underwritten by the Edward F. Cook Agency, will begin at 7:30 p.m.

Snow. You know, that white stuff that used to fall in winter? Well the lack of it, coupled with this winter's balmy temperatures have left some feeling cheated.

And it's not just skaters and sledders. Some year-round business owners who depend on the trials of winter as much as the busy summer have seen income drop because of the non-winter of '98.

"It definitely has affected our business," said Victor DiPietro, who has run Amagansett's V&V Auto Service Center for more than 20 years. Not only have cars had an easy ride . . . but the salt-free roads have kept them relatively clean, hanging V&V's relatively new car wash pretty much out to dry.

"Normally, you start having cold weather in November," said Mr. DiPietro. "What it does is it reminds people to winterize their cars . . . everything from snow tires to belts and hoses. We didn't have that this year."

Fewer Repairs

Regular winter repairs, such as dead batteries, sputtered-out starter motors, and snow-related fender-benders have been scarce at other service stations as well. At V&V, Mr. DiPietro said he had to trim back his mechanics' hours for the first time.

Less than an inch of snow fell on the South Fork this year, according to Richard Hendrickson of Bridgehampton, an observer for the National Weather Service. The average winter snowfall here is 24 inches.

"I've had my station here for 67 years," Mr. Hendrickson said. "I've had months without snow, but I've never had a whole winter without snow. That's quite a record-breaker."

Other White Stuff

"Through the entire winter months of December, January, February, and even so far into March, we're running from five to seven degrees above normal," Mr. Hendrickson said.

While there has been no snow removal work, the East Hampton Town Highway Department has faced other white stuff this winter: some 1,700 tons of road salt piled up in the town's highway barns.

The lack of snow has kept the Highway Department's budgetary coffers well-stocked, however. The town had earmarked $165,000 for snow removal expenses this year, including potential overtime for department employees, equipment, and materials.

Downside

"Very, very little" of that has been touched, said Christopher Russo, Town Highway Superintendent. Since money in the snow-removal budget is not transferable to other budget lines, surpluses will be carried over into next year's budget, perhaps reducing the amount of money that the department will have to raise by taxes.

The Highway Department emerg ed from last year's mild winter with a sizable surplus as well. The winter of 1995 blanketed the South Fork in snow and put the department $105,000 over budget for snow removal.

A winter without snow lessens some of the headaches for the department, but it also has its downside, Mr. Russo said. "The guys lose their edge. The guys don't get any training."

Ups And Downs

For those with small snow-plowing businesses, or even those with a snow plow, a pickup, and a few driveway jobs, the winter of 1995 was lucrative; this year such a possibility has been nonexistent.

"You know, it's been up and down. That's the way the winters are," said Randy Reichart, whose Hamptons Auto Collision on Springs-Fireplace Road in East Hampton offers snow plowing as one of its services.

"It's Gravy"

Mr. Reichart said the snow-plowing business is more of a bonus for people who have the equipment, not a necessary part of their income. "Hey, if it comes in, it's gravy. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

The mild winter has cut into his auto-body work, Mr. Reichart noted, as well.

As for farming, Mr. Hendrickson said the mild winter could mean trouble come the growing season.

"Usually, they say if the ground gets good and frozen over the winter, it breaks up better, plows over better," said Mr. Hendrickson. "It also kills a lot of the bugs that hibernate under the ground. . . . I'm pretty sure there will be a big infestation of insects."

In the year of our Lord, 1635, the tenth of July, came I, Lion Gardiner and Mary my wife from Woerden a towne in Holland, where my wife was born . . . to London and from thence to New England and dwelt at Saybrooke forte four years . . . of which I was commander: and there was borne to me a son named David, 1636 . . . the first born in that place, . . . Then I went to an island of mine owne which I had bought and purchased of the Indians, called by them Manchonake by us the Isle of Wight, and there was born another daughter named Elizabeth . . . in 1641, she being the first child of English parents that was born there.

- Lion Gardiner,

lines in a family Bible.

Richard F. White Jr.'s Montauk roots date back to 1928, when his grandfather opened White's Drug Store. The family has been civic activists ever since, and Dick White is no exception: in addition to both elected and appointed posts in East Hampton Town government, there is hardly a volunteer job he hasn't held.

A former East Hampton Town Councilman, town budget director, Montauk School Board member, Montauk Fire Department Commissioner, and member of the East Hampton Town Planning Board, Mr. White has a little more time now, since retiring as the proprietor of White's Liquor Store in Montauk, to pursue a lifelong passion - local history.

"My love of history was lit by a fellow by the name of Dick Gilmartin," he said in a recent interview. "As I was growing up, we had a loosely organized club called the Explorers Club. He would drive us all over the East End of Long Island, to different sites, and tell us what happened there. He made history come alive; he gave us this 'elixir.'

"From a very early age, I was given this inspiration, and it's directly related to him."

As chairman of the Montauk Historical Society's lighthouse committee, Mr. White was instrumental in the creation of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum more than a decade ago. Now, he said, it welcomes more than 100,000 visitors a year.

With the Lighthouse Museum having attained "world-class" status, said Mr. White, he and others are brainstorming a museum that will document Montauk's military history, to be located at Camp Hero. That project is "in the embryonic stage," he said, awaiting completion of New York State's master plan for the site.

Meanwhile, Mr. White, who serves as Montauk's representative to East Hampton Town's 350th anniversary committee, is helping to plan the centennial of the Montauk encampment of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, which, as fate would have it, dovetails neatly with the town's tricentquinquagenary celebration.

The Suffolk County Parks Department is collaborating on the first of several memorials to the Spanish-American War veterans, to be held Memorial Day weekend. On Labor Day weekend, Montauk will play host to a two-day extravaganza featuring a re-enactment of Camp Wikoff, where thousands of Rough Riders and other veterans of the war were sent to recover from yellow fever and other tropical illnesses, contracted during the fighting in Cuba. The weekend will also feature a vintage-1898 county fair and a Wild West show.

The group has lined up James Foote, a professional Roosevelt impersonator, to speak before a Sept. 18 parade through Montauk, another event Mr. White is helping to arrange.

Mr. White is retired in name only. In addition to his work for the anniversary committee and the Rough Riders centennial, he is the treasurer of the Montauk Fire Department and a trustee of the County Parks Department. Last year he was the grand marshal of Montauk's St. Patrick's Day parade.

"I used to surfcast," he said. "Since I sold the store, I haven't wet a line."

Miankoma Lane runs from Amagansett Main Street to Bluff Road along land owned for centuries by the Baker family, one of the first four English families to settle the hamlet. "Miankoma" is generally agreed to mean "assembly place," but whether the word is of Montaukett or Delaware Indian origin is uncertain; both have been credited. It does not appear in William Wallace Tooker's book of Long Island Indian place names.

During the winter of 1903-04, Miankoma Hall was built, though its namesake road was not "established" until 1916. Frank M. Griffing built the hall as a meeting place for the Ladies Society of Busy Workers, which was three years old at the time.

Summer fairs were held for the "Hall Fund," the first one making a profit of $200. The ladies bought the land for $500, a debt paid off within a year. The building itself was paid for with a $1,700 mortgage, which was retired in February 1912.

Card parties, socials, dances, suppers, and dramatic performances were held in the spacious interior of Miankoma Hall. At one time, it was rented to an enterprising resident for use as a roller-skating rink, according to Carleton Kelsey's "Amagansett: A Pictorial History," though that did not last long. Mr. Kelsey, longtime historian of East Hampton Town, adds that "the first motion pictures (movies) shown here were possibly at Miankoma Hall."

The Busy Workers sold the building in 1931, at the height of the Depression, to A.A. Haines Council 66, Junior Order United American Mechanics. The proceeds paid for several thousand feet of concrete sidewalk along Main Street, all the way to Atlantic Avenue. (A sidewalk plaque commemorating the Ladies Society of Busy Workers may be found near the Amagansett School, which was built five years later.)

United American Mechanics either sold or donated Miankoma Hall at some point to the American Legion; the date of transfer could not be confirmed. The Legion sold the building in 1945 to Tsuya Matsuki, who used it for many years as a summer residence and music studio. In a 1989 study of historic buildings conducted for the town, the preservationist Robert J. Hefner reported that the structure "retains the over-scaled semi-elliptical fanlight in the front gable, but the porch across the front facade has been closed in."

Ms. Matsuki died in 1990, after selling the house to the late actor David Doyle and his wife, Anita.

Lion Gardiner asked Wyandanch to kill all the Pequots

and "send me their heads."

Long Island's first English settler never heard the words "New York."

Excerpted from Roger Wunderlich's lecture at Guild Hall Saturday.

. . . . As a townsman of East Hampton, Lion Gardiner helped to shape a new and American social design, which enabled ordinary folk to own property and enjoy the freedoms restricted to the privileged gentry across the sea. However, though he was our founding father he was not our patron saint. While his statesmanship cemented peaceful relations between the settlers and the Indians, he also presided over the peaceable but permanent transfer of Long Island real estate from its Native American owners to himself and his fellow settlers. As the symbol of two phenomena - the formation of the model Puritan township and the nonviolent displacement of Indians - Lion Gardiner personified the dual and sometimes ambivalent mission of the colonists of Long Island.

Necessity compelled Gardiner and his compatriots to cope with the basic conditions of life in completely new surroundings. This involved the providing, from a standing start, of food, shelter, and artifacts, and a safe and harmonious social order attuned to the New World, not the Old. Above all, as they dealt with these elementary needs, the uninvited settlers grappled with the question of their legal right to the land that was now their only home. It was glaringly apparent that every acre was the possession of the indigenous Native Americans.

. . . Although death by disease played the largest part, the issue of how the Indians lost their land still goads our historical conscience, and we seek acceptable motives for the policies of the colonists. The blunt reality is that the tide of English immigration, swelled by the prospect of land for the taking, proved far too strong for deterrence by legal niceties. Lion Gardiner, the intrepid pioneer and archetype of English homesteaders, was also a businessman obsessed with acquiring real estate from its present, ancestral owners.

Many of his contemporaries held that the Indians were primitive simpletons, whose collective holding of tribal grounds made real estate dealing impossible. According to the conventional wisdom, the aborigines were too uncivilized to conceive of buying and selling land they naively believed belonged to all who lived on it.

Lion Gardiner, to his credit, exhibited none of this pervasive prejudice. He accepted Indians as friends and not inferiors: his cordial relations with Yovawan and Wyandanch, the successive sachems with whom he dealt, exempted eastern Long Island from the interracial bloodshed that afflicted Connecticut and Massachusetts. In the process, however, Gardiner amassed a fortune in land by "buying" it for trinkets, and expediting sales by promoting the Native American seller, especially Wyandanch, to the fictitious but handy rubber-stamp rank of "Sachem of all Long Island."

. . . Lion Gardiner's lineage has not been traced, but according to Curtiss C. Gardiner, who wrote the history of his famous ancestor on the 250th anniversary of Lion's arrival on his island, "He was probably a gentleman without title, of the middle rank, between the nobility and the yeomanry, yet he might have been a yeoman."

Granted that 17th-century spelling was on a do-it-yourself basis, Lion generally signed himself as "Gardener," a name which Curtiss C. Gardiner pointed out "may be derived from an occupation, the keeper of a garden," and subsequently "may have been changed . . . to Gardiner, that the occupation and the name of a person might be the more readily distinguishable." His unusual first name "was Lion, as he invariably wrote it so": there is no reason to speculate that his baptismal name was Lionel. His army grade was sergeant . . .

Nothing is known of Gardiner's life before 1635, the starting point of his memoir, "Leift. Lion Gardener his Relation of the Pequot Warres . . . . "

Saybrook was a disaster. "According to promise," wrote Lion, "we expected that there would have come from England 300 able men, 50 to till the ground, and 50 to build houses. But our great expectation at the River's mouth, came only two men, Mr. Fenwick, and his man." A recent historian of the Winthrops found that after five discouraging months, John Winthrop Jr., Gardiner's superior, "quit Saybrook . . . before the end of his term as governor, and left Lion Gardiner in charge of the thinly manned outpost, to spend a miserable winter [1636-37] behind the palisades, beleaguered by Pequots."

Somehow, Lion managed to shepherd his small flock of settlers through the hardships of that bitter season, when he "had but twenty-four in all, men, women, and boys and girls, and not food for two months, unless we saved our cornfield, which could not possibly be if they came to war, for it is two miles from our home."

The war he dreaded was with the Pequots, the intractable local Indians with whom traders had been skirmishing, and whose extermination was held necessary by many New England settlers . . .

. . .The Pequots' defeat led to Gardiner's meeting with Wyandanch, the Montauk leader, who visited Saybrook three days after the battle . . . According to Gardiner, the purpose of Wyandanch's call was to "know if we were angry with all Indians," or only with Pequots. In his typically forthright manner, Lion answered, "No, but only with such as had killed Englishmen." When Wyandanch asked if the English would trade with "they that lived on Long Island," Gardiner gave him a conditional yes: "If you will kill all the Pequits that come to you, and send me their heads, then . . . you shall have trade with us." Wyandanch said he would bring this news to "his brother . . . and if we may have peace and trade with you, we will give you tribute, as we did the Pequits. . ."

. . .The price of peace on Long Island was harsh, but the pact between Gardiner and Wyandanch, and the lasting friendship that followed, relieved eastern Long Island of the English-Indian carnage that persisted for 40 years in New England, from the Pequot War in Connecticut through King Philip's War in Massachusetts.

Soon after Winthrop left Saybrook, Lion wrote to him that those who remained would be loyal and work hard for the colony, but "it seemed wee have neither masters nor owners." If not provided for, he continued, "then I must be forced to shift as the Lord may direct."

To shift as the Lord may direct was something Lion did incredibly well. At the end of his Saybrook contract, in 1639, he crossed the Sound with his family and some farmer-soldiers from the fort to become the first of an unbroken line of lords of the manor of Gardiner's Island, seven and a half miles long and three miles across at the widest point, a few miles offshore from East Hampton. Lion called it the Isle of Wight because of its contour; the Indian name, "Manchonake," meant a place where many had died, perhaps from some great sickness that swept the East End of Long Island before the coming of the English.

. . . In contrast to many of his peers, Gardiner did not clutter his mind with superstition, as proven by his reaction to an accusation of witchcraft. The defendant, Goody Garlick, was charged with causing the death in childbirth of none other than Lion's young daughter, Elizabeth Howell, in 1657. Perhaps because Goody and Joshua Garlick, her husband, worked for him for many years, or perhaps because he had too much common sense to believe in "black cats and harlequin devils . . . Lion seems to have exerted himself in behalf of this unfortunate woman," wrote Alexander Gardiner. Lion's influence aborted a trial at Hartford and saved Goody "from an awful fate."

. . .East End English settlers and Native Americans never met on the field of battle, but the Montauks and Narragansetts did. In a 1654 raid the Narragansett/Niantic warlord Ninigret is said to have pillaged the camp of Wyandanch on the night of his daughter's wedding, killed the groom, and kidnapped the bride. On behalf of the grief-stricken father, Thomas James [East Hampton's first minister] begged John Winthrop Jr. to help to speed delivery of the wampum raised for ransom, "which he [Wyandanch] hears was intercepted by Thomas Stanton [a colonist]."

"At last," wrote Curtiss C. Gardiner, "through the exertions of [Lion] Gardiner . . . (the young woman) was redeemed and restored to her afflicted parents."

To express his gratitude, Wyandanch, with his wife and son, made a free gift to Lion Gardiner . . . of land that "lyeth on Long Island . . . between Huntington and Setauket . . . [and] more than half way through the island southerly." Dated East Hampton, 14 July 1659, the deed acknowledged Lion's "kindness . . . counsell and advice in our prosperity. . . . "

If Lion used his friendship with Indians to his advantage, his trust in them was genuine. When Wyandanch was ordered to testify before the magistrates of Southampton, and his people feared for their sachem's safety, Lion, who happened to be at the Montauk camp, presented himself as a hostage. "I will stay here till you all know it is well with your Sachem," he declared, in his strong, terse, style, "if they bind him, bind me, and if they kill him, kill me."

. . .In 1660, the governor of Barbados, who was a friend of John Winthrop Jr.'s, expressed interest in buying Gardiner's Island. Oh no, wrote Lion to Winthrop, "I, having children and children's children, am not minded to sell it at present." . . . "Butt I have another place," went on Lion, "more convenient for the gentleman that would buy, liinge upon Long Iland, between Huntington and Setokett."

When this sale fell through, Lion and his son David conveyed to Richard Smith (then known as Smythe) the land that would be the principal part of the future town of Smithtown.

. . . Lion Gardiner died in 1663, at the age of 64, one year before the English conquest of New Netherland from the Dutch: the creator of its first settlement never heard the words "New York." Although he had to dilute his fortune in order to redeem the debts run up by David, his extravagant son, he left a considerable estate. In his will he apologized to his wife, his sole beneficiary, for not leaving more . . .

In 1665, one year after the English ousted the Dutch from New Netherland, Mary Gardiner died and, contrary to Lion's wishes, left Gardiner's Island to their son. Richard Nicolls, the Governor of the newly formed New York Province, gave David Gardiner a grant for the Isle of Wight at an annual quit rent of five pounds. Five years later, the rent was commuted to one lamb yearly, upon demand, by Governor Francis Lovelace. In 1686, David received a new patent from Governor Thomas Dongan, who erected the Isle of Wight "a lordship and manor to be henceforth called the lordship and manor of Gardiner's Island.". . . Their ownership remained uncontested, but the Gardiners' unlimited powers were curtailed in 1788, when the State Legislature annexed the island to the Town of East Hampton.

The life of Lion Gardiner, Long Island's first English settler and founding father, illumines our understanding of Long Island as America. To begin with, his experience contradicts the assumption that Long Island was cloned from New England. Gardiner and fellow settlers were not New Englanders who came to Long Island, but English emigrants who sojourned in New England before choosing to make the Island their permanent home.

He embodied the old and new system of ownership: he was the lord of his own manor who also served as a townsman of the Puritan commonwealth of East Hampton. There, in the words of the historian Peter Ross, "he filled the office of magistrate and in all respects was regarded as the representative citizen of that section of the island."

. . . Largely due to his diplomacy, the interracial wars of the mainland did not erupt on eastern Long Island. In the process, Gardiner acquired a handsome fortune in Long Island land by inducing his Indian friends to sell him large tracts at small prices, confirmed by English deeds.

Three hundred and fifty-nine years have passed since Lion Gardiner, freedom fighter and pioneer, set foot on eastern Long Island. He and his hardy wife, Mary, who left her comfortable home in Holland to cross the ocean with her husband and suffer the rigors of frontier life, are symbols of the transition from the Old World to the New by the first generation of emigrants. They were Americans long before the word was coined.

Roger Wunderlich is a professor of history at the State University at Stony Brook and the editor of the Long Island Historical Journal. After 50 years in business, he returned to school to earn bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in history.

Shippy's Pumpernickels East

Windmill Lane

Southampton

283-0007

Open for lunch and dinner every day.

There comes a time, and an icy March night with face-lashing rain may be it, when frisee salad just doesn't cut it. When fiddlehead ferns and plates decorated with swirls of persimmon coulis seem like a cruel joke.

Looking guiltily over your shoulder to see if the food police are listening, you decide that what you want is a plate of steaming sauerbraten and potato dumplings. Muffler-wrapped and furtive, you set out, as we did last week, for Shippy's Pumpernickels East in Southampton, home of the good old-fashioned chowfest.

Lambert, our delicate-palated dinner companion, was not invited. His face darkens if the parmesan on his Caesar salad is not freshly shaved, and the sight of Shippy's iceberg lettuce snowed under with blue-cheese dressing would have given him the vapors.

Not For Sticks

As would the size and heartiness of the entrees. This is not a joint for the stick-thin health nut, this is for big, healthy appetites and those who don't mind waking up five pounds heavier the next morning.

Of course, I'm exaggerating, because Shippy's always has a daily menu of local seafood, but on the whole people do go there for the meat dishes and the German specialties.

The atmosphere and decor go along with the food - friendly and unpretentious, with green-leather booths, Tiffany-style lamps, and a long, polished bar counter.

When you go in, there's no sign telling you to wait around like lemons until someone notices you, you just go in and sit where you fancy.

Daily Specials

All the entrees come with a choice of soup or salad, and Shippy's pea soup is really exceptionally good. For those who want something a little more adventurous, there are chopped liver, smoked oysters, a tongue and onion salad, baked clams, marinated herring, shrimp cocktail, and more, at prices ranging from $5.50 to $9.25.

There is always an inexpensive daily special between $13 and $15. On this occasion it was roast lamb; on another visit, it was beef goulash.

The roast lamb was those thin round slices from an unrecognizable part of the lamb's anatomy and not slices cut from a fresh-cooked joint, but it was okay, with good gravy and delicious mashed potatoes.

The huge portion of goulash was also workmanlike and robust, the word goulash being the nearest it got to anything fancy.

Brobdingnagian Perfection

But now we move on to the more serious stuff, starting with a Brob-dingnagian portion of breaded pork chops.

Shippy's cooks them to perfection - the dark and crunchy outside damming up the juices of the tender interior meat - but I defy anyone to eat both at one sitting. So take one home with you - I can attest that it makes a divine meal, and cure, for 4 a.m. insomnia.

The sauerbraten, served with a creamy potato dumpling and zesty red cabbage, was meltingly tender. As was the dauntingly large helping of calf's liver with fried onions and bacon.

You can choose among three traditional German sausages - bratwurst, knockwurst, or weisswurst (pork, beef, or veal) - which are served with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. We tried the knockwurst. It was very knockwursty.

Hunger Helps

All the dishes are old-fashioned, grassroots, good, heavy food and it certainly helps to be hungry. The wiener schnitzel - tender, tasty, with no stinting on the frying oil - lapped over the edges of its plate like a Black Forest comforter; the chopped sirloin a la Pumpernickel turned out to be a megahamburger about the size and shape of Ayers Rock.

Diners may then move on to a selection of old favorites such as apple strudel, chocolate fudge cake, cheesecake, carrot cake, etc. But we were kaput.

You leave Shippy's in a friendly, sated glow, with this refrain humming in your head: "There goes the diet up the creek - it's frisee salad for a week."

"After you bin havin' steak every night, beans, beans taste fine" goes a song on a very old L.P. I have, given me by Shel Silverstein. He was a folk singer then; now, of course, he is known to the world as the author of "Light in the Attic," the longest-running children's book on the Top 10 list in history.

And though Shel's slightly salacious lyrics did not really refer to beans, it's my fond hope that a few unsophisticated children took them literally. Mine did. Or maybe bean love was simply engendered by the family's Southern roots, or genetics, or the fact that I cook them so often.

I adore just about every kind of dried bean on the planet (though I never could abide those store-bought, sugary, "New England Baked Beans" that come in a brown jar).

While beans used to be relegated to the tables of the poor, with the change in dietary habits and the greater knowledge of nutrition, beans can now take their deliciously rightful place on the toniest tables.

Black beans, once the province of Mexican and South American restaurants, seem to pop up everywhere now - in salsas and salads as well as more traditional dishes, in the kitchens of celebrated chefs.

And bean purees are displacing potatoes and rice and other carbs in urbane settings heretofore inhospitable to the homely charms of dried legumes.

They really do not take forever to cook, even if you've forgotten to soak them overnight, especially if they're from the current year's harvest. The quick-soak method works just fine.

And even old beans succumb quickly to the pressure-cooker, an invaluable tool for getting tasty, home-cooked dinners on the table quickly.

Cassoulet, one of the most magnificent creations of the French culinary art, is creeping back onto menus even though it may be the most complicated bean dish ever invented. It is becoming slightly less difficult to locate the pale green flageolets the French turn into a scrumptious accompaniment, often served with lamb.

Cheap Vitamins

Just the other night I served them with roast leg of venison. The flageolets somewhat upstaged the entree, with many requests for seconds.

These small, pale-green, dried beans are shaped like miniature marrow (Great Northern) beans.

However, they cost about three times as much (still cheap for so much protein, iron, potassium, calcium, vitamins, and soluble fiber in deliciously edible form), possibly because they're French and found almost exclusively in specialty food stores like Dean and DeLuca or the Gourmet Garage in Manhattan and the Red Horse in East Hampton.

Flageolets With Garlic And Thyme

Serves 8.

1 lb. dried flageolets, soaked at least 4 hours

Tepid water

1 medium onion stuck with 2 cloves

1 Tbsp. butter

4 cloves garlic, chopped

1 medium onion, minced

2/3 cup half-and-half

Salt to taste

Freshly ground white pepper to taste

2 Tbsp. fresh thyme and parsley leaves, mixed

Bouquet garni (tie these in a cheesecloth packet):

1 large bay leaf

1 med. carrot, halved

1 large stalk celery with top, halved

4 sprigs fresh thyme

4 sprigs parsley

4 whole white peppercorns

Cover And Re-Cover

Wash and discard any shriveled or discolored beans, cover with cool water, and soak. Drain the beans and re-cover, by a couple of inches, with tepid water.

Make the bouquet garni and tuck it down into the middle of the beans. Bring them to the simmer, cover loosely, and cook at low heat for about 45 minutes, or until tender but not mushy. Older beans take longer to cook.

When they are tender to the tooth, remove the bouquet garni. Toss a few ice cubes in the pot and place in a cool place if you don't wish to use them immediately. Otherwise, drain, saving the liquid (the leftovers, if any, make wonderful soup).

Soup From Leftovers

Melt the butter over low heat and saute the garlic and onion gently until transparent. Add the half-and-half, heat, and stir this into the beans, along with salt and pepper to taste, taking care not to break the beans.

The entire dish can be made ahead to this point, covered, and refrigerated until an hour before serving time. Heat to the boiling point and scatter with the remaining herbs.

Note: To make soup of any leftovers, puree them in a processor and add enough of the reserved bean liquid to achieve a heavy-cream consistency. Stir in a little cream or milk, heat to just under the boil, and serve.

Black Bean Cakes With Sour Cream

These bean cakes, perhaps patterned on the Cuban bollos, are turning up more and more often on damask-clothed tables. They are interesting enough to serve as a first course, a cocktail appetizer if made very small, or as one usually sees them, on the plate with beef or chicken.

Freshly cooked beans are best, but you could make do with canned ones, well drained and rinsed of the goo they come in.

Makes 6 large cakes or 12 small.

21/2 cups cooked black beans, drained

3 Tbsp. finely chopped scallions

1 small fresh jalapeno, roasted

1 tsp. ground cumin

1 tsp. ground cardomom

1/2 cup fine dry bread crumbs

1 egg, beaten

2 tsp. red wine vinegar

salt and freshly milled pepper to taste

vegetable oil for frying

1/4 cup fine yellow cornmeal

1 cup sour cream

1 or 2 Tbsp. freshly minced cilantro

Use Rubber Gloves

Process the beans until coarsely pureed. Chop in the scallions, pulsing once or twice, then turn the mixture into a bowl. Roast the jalapeno, turning it on the end of a long fork over a gas flame, until it blisters enough to scrape off the skin. Use rubber gloves to handle it.

Scrape out the seeds, then chop finely. Add it to the pureed beans and stir in all remaining ingredients as far down in the recipe as the vegetable oil.

Shape the bean mixture into six (or 12) evenly-sized cakes. Heat about a quarter-inch of the oil in a large, heavy skillet, to hot but not smoking. Spread cornmeal out on a large piece of waxed paper and turn each cake to coat both sides lightly.

Slide each cake in gently - a slotted flexible spatula is helpful for this - and do not crowd them. Fry about two minutes on each side and drain on paper towel. Serve hot on hot plates and distribute a spoonful of sour cream on each, topped with a generous dusting of cilantro.

Calypso Beans With Sausage

Calypso, Jacob's Cattle, or several other of the lovely mottled-white-bean varieties may be used for this one-dish meal, which is great for a buffet. It can be prepared a day ahead - it's the better for it, in fact - and reheated in its casserole dish. Grilled kielbasa is tucked into the beans just before the final bake.

Serves six to eight.

1 lb. dried calypso, Jacob's Cattle, or similar beans,

soaked and drained

Tepid water to cover

1 large stalk celery with tops, broken in half

1 medium carrot, cut in half

Bouquet garni:

4 sprigs parsley

3 sprigs thyme

1/2 tsp. fennel seeds

2 cloves garlic, smashed

4 or 5 white peppercorns, smashed

2 small or 1 large chicken bouillon cube

Salt to taste

3 ripe plum tomatoes, quartered

1 lb. kielbasa, lightly grilled and cut in 2-inch lengths

1 Tbsp. minced fresh parsley

Give The Bag A Smash

Wash, rinse, and soak the beans in the usual way. Drain, and cover with tepid water by two inches. Add the celery and carrot along with the bouquet garni ingredients tied in a cheesecloth bag. Give the bag a smash with the side of a cleaver before adding to the beans.

Bring to a boil and simmer with lid askew for about 30 minutes. Skim if necessary. When the beans are tender, gently stir in the bouillon cubes. When dissolved, let the beans rest off-heat for half an hour, then taste. Add salt if necessary, keeping in mind that kielbasa is also salty.

Discard the carrot, celery, and bouquet. Drain the beans, reserving some of the pot liquor. Put them into an oven-to-table crock or deep gratin dish; tuck the pieces of sausage halfway in, along with the pieces of tomato. Add a large ladle of the bean liquor.

The dish can be completely made ahead up to this point.

Bake in a preheated 350 F. oven on the center shelf for about 30 minutes, sprinkle with chopped fresh parsley, and serve.

"It's two miracles," said Gloria Jones of Sagaponack, of what will be the almost simultaneous release of movies based on "The Thin Red Line" by her late husband, James Jones, and "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," from a book written by her daughter, Kaylie Jones.

Her book was optioned in 1994, said Kaylie Jones, while her father's had been optioned as long ago as 1988, so their arrival on the screen at about the same time, in the fall of this year, was a complete accident.

"A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is an Ismail Merchant/James Ivory production starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey.

Americans In Paris

Drawing on autobiographical details of her childhood in Paris, Ms. Jones's book tells the story of the expatriate life of an American couple and of growing up in that milieu.

HarperCollins will reprint the book to coincide with the movie's release in September.

The movie covers a span of 10 years, from the mid-'60s to the mid-'70s, and two sets of children had to be found.

"The little ones weren't actors," said the author, "but they were bilingual. It was hard to find an older pair who were not only bilingual, but who looked like the first pair."

It is also a film about orphans, she said, and about "not fitting in." Both parents are orphans themselves and they adopt a 5-year-old French boy. He adapts and Americanizes himself, only to have his father die at the end of the movie.

Two-thirds of the film was shot on the Ile de St. Louis in Paris and the remaining third in Wilmington, Conn. Together with her husband, Kevin Heisler, and their 5-week-old baby, Ms. Jones traveled to Wilmington to watch the shooting.

"It looks very much like the Hamptons 15 or 20 years ago," she said. "It was filmed at a beautiful house on a waterway with views of the sunset. Very like Mecox or Sagaponack."

"Thin Red Line"

She was also invited to spend four days on the set of "The Thin Red Line" in Hollywood. John Travolta was in one of the scenes they watched being filmed, playing a cameo role as a general.

"The Thin Red Line," set in the South Pacific in World War II, is about an Army rifle company trying to take a hill on Guadalcanal from the Japanese. Produced by Phoenix Pictures and Fox 2000 Pictures, it is scheduled for release at Christmas.

The movie, which is directed by the eminent Terrence Malick, who made "Badlands" and "Days of Heaven," has an all-star cast - George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Bill Pullman, and Mr. Travolta - but two relative unknowns play the leads, Adrien Brody as Fife and Jim Caviezel as Witt.

"It makes it so much more realistic," said Ms. Jones. "This way, you don't know which ones are going to make it to the end of the movie."

She also felt that Mr. Malick ("He's magnificent, so talented.") insured that the roles would be truer to the characters in the book if the audience were not distracted by a famous face.

"It's amazing how everything al ways seems to happen at once," re marked Ms. Jones, to the background accompaniment of baby noises.

Those "hounds of spring on winter's traces" have been digging in the flowerbed for more than a week now. Out of nowhere, to paraphrase the Bard this time, rough winds did shake the darling buds of March, and the temperature dropped like a stone.

The daffodils that have flowered so early don't mind a bit of frost, but those tender perennials that have unwisely poked their noses above ground and the foolhardy buds on flowering shrubs are vulnerable to sudden, sharp freezes.

The damage here, however, is mainly aesthetic. Farmers may have to postpone planting potatoes for a week or two until the ground defrosts, and spring vegetables will probably be late, but that's about the extent of it. In the South, on the other hand, where azaleas bloomed two months ahead of time following one of the mildest winters on record, the unexpected cold snap is believed to have destroyed as much as three-quarters of Georgia's peach crop and a large number of orange groves in central Florida. In Louisiana, they were spraying the strawberry fields with water last week, trying valiantly to clothe the emerging fruits in a protective cloak of ice.

Spring makes its appearance tomorrow. Two weeks ago, nobody even cared - we thought we'd beaten winter completely. Now, however, we are acutely conscious of the official change of seasons, hoping that Mother Nature will follow the calendar's counsel this time, as she has not done for months.