As I mentioned a few months ago in my review of the Community Supper at the Union Episcopal Church in Claremont, NH, I’ve been trying to make it to more of the various community meals that spring up around the area. Harvest suppers. Fire department fund raisers. Non-profit fundraisers. That sort of thing. And that brings me to an event I had seen advertised a handful of times, a monthly community breakfast run by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows Forest Lodge #69 Breakfast. Held the third Sunday of each month from 8:00 to 11:00 am, the breakfast is served buffet-style, with scrambled eggs, eggs and omelettes to order, blueberry and plain pancakes, biscuits and sausage gravy, corned beef hash, homemade brown beans, homefries, bacon, sausage, fresh-carved ham, and various beverages. Oh, and they use real maple syrup.
The trick here is that you’ve got to get to Marlow. It’s one of those nice little New Hampshire towns that doesn’t get a whole lot of traffic, since aside from a few people commuting between the Upper Valley and Keene (Marlow is about 2/3 of the way from Grantham to Keene), it’s not really on the way to anywhere (and for me, it’s about a 45 minute drive from my house in Grantham). So you have to both check the calendar and make a bit of an effort to do the drive, but soon enough you find yourself in the town center of Marlow right by the town hall, the fire station, and… the Odd Fellows Hall. While a lot of small New England towns have various Odd Fellows halls, many of them are no longer in use, but Marlow’s lodge keeps going strong.
Walking in side, it’s just like other community breakfasts held in church halls and basements: they’ve set up a buffet line, a beverage area, a custom egg station, and a bunch of tables where you can dine and meet other community members.
So, right after entry, you grab your plate and you can get started on the buffet line. While I’ve been to a lot of great community breakfasts around Northern New England, this breakfast buffet is really something else, akin to what I’d get in a better hotel. One of the Odd Fellows is cooking eggs to order. There are good biscuits and fresh home-made gravy. A ham carving station. Several different types of pancakes. Both home fries and corned beef hash. And even that classic of New England breakfasts, a big tray of homemade baked beans. Really, it’s a great selection.
So yeah, my breakfast was bountiful, to the point where I had tap into my structural engineering background to keep everything piled up. But it was quite good, everything was nice and freshly prepared, with the corned beef hash having a nice crisp, and the beans being particularly good. Probably one of the best community breakfasts I’ve had.
After all that, I left off one of the best parts. This community breakfast costs the princely sum of a $9 suggested donation. And if you’re worried about this just being some sort of recruiting drive for the Odd Fellows (who really aren’t all that “odd”), that hasn’t been my experience: they are just looking to have a nice, welcoming community breakfast. The result is one of the best community meals in the region, in many ways on-par with the excellent Famous Hartland Roast Beef Supper. It’s definitely worth checking out at some point.
