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Baked Pork and Beans
Soak one quart of beans in cold soft water over night; the next morning wash the beans in fresh water, then put them in the pot with two quarts of cold water, place over a slow fire, and cook slowly two hours. Then score one and a half pounds of salt pork, put it into the center of the beans, in a dripping pan. Bake very slowly and until well browned.
Lima and kidney beans are often dried and baked as above.
A plain New England-style bean pot with no molasses or sweetening, which makes the pork and the long slow bake the whole of the flavour. Two things the original leaves out: an oven temperature and how much liquid to keep in the pan.
- The hinge: never let the beans dry outThe beans must stay barely covered with liquid for the entire bake, topping up with boiling water as needed. Once the top layer goes dry it turns leathery and no amount of further baking softens it.
- A quart of beansMeasured dry, that is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb of navy or pea beans, which will feed eight to ten as a side dish. They swell to about three times the volume, so use a pot with real headroom.
- Soft waterHard water and its calcium keep bean skins tough. If your tap water is very hard, use filtered or bottled water for both the soak and the cooking; a pinch of baking soda in the soaking water is the traditional fix and has a similar softening effect.
- "Cook slowly two hours"A bare simmer, not a rolling boil, which breaks the beans apart. Two hours is a guide -- go by the beans, which should be tender enough to crush against the roof of your mouth before they go into the oven.
- Oven temperatureThe original only says "bake very slowly"; in modern terms that is somewhere in the region of 275-300F. Reckon on several hours covered, then uncover for the last 30-45 minutes to brown the top and the pork rind.
- The dripping panA shallow roasting pan evaporates far too fast for this. Use a lidded bean pot, Dutch oven or deep casserole; the traditional bean pot is narrow-mouthed, which limits evaporation.
- Salt porkStill sold, usually as a slab of cured, unsmoked pork belly. Score the rind in a diamond pattern down to the fat and bury the piece so only the scored top shows. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or pancetta will stand in, though with less fat to render.
- SaltThe pork carries most of it. Taste before adding any.
- The kidney bean noteDried kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin and need a full rolling boil for at least ten minutes to destroy it. The recipe's slow stovetop stage will not reliably reach that, so give soaked kidney beans a genuine ten-minute boil before they go anywhere near a slow oven.
Baked beans in a slow oven with a piece of salt pork is among the long-established Anglo-American household dishes, and its familiar shape is usually credited to the New England Sabbath: the pot went into the cooling brick oven or the communal bakehouse on Saturday evening and came out for Sunday, when no cooking was to be done. That this version has no molasses is worth noticing -- the sweetened Boston style was only one regional habit among several, and plain, unsweetened versions were made elsewhere. The closing line about lima and kidney beans is a reminder that the recipe is really a method rather than a formula, applied to whatever dried bean the pantry held.