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Boston Baked Beans
Soak one quart of beans twelve hours; put on one pound of fat salt pork in plenty of water to cover the whole; put in the beans with a little salt and one large spoonful of molasses. Bake in a slow oven six or eight hours; the beans must be kept covered with hot water.
A bare-bones version of the classic, written for cooks who already owned a bean pot and knew what one looked like. The instructions are sound; what they leave out is quantity, temperature and the reason the pot must be watched.
- The hinge: never let the pot go dryThe line "the beans must be kept covered with hot water" is the whole technique. Check every hour or so and top up with boiling water from a kettle — cold water halts the cooking and toughens the skins, and beans that break the surface scorch and stay hard.
- A quart of beansDry measure, roughly 2 lb of small white beans — navy or pea beans, which is what a New England kitchen would have meant by "beans". That yields 8 to 10 generous servings, which is why the pot was a Saturday institution rather than a weeknight side.
- A slow ovenConventionally reckoned at about 300°F; 250°F suits the full eight hours. The point is a long, barely-bubbling braise; anything hotter risks breaking the beans down before the liquid reduces.
- The salt porkA pound of fat salt pork for a quart of beans is period-correct and heavily salted by modern taste. Scald or rinse it first, score the rind in a diamond pattern, and bury all but the top in the beans so the exposed skin crisps. Cut the added salt accordingly — taste before you add any.
- "One large spoonful of molasses"In recipes of this kind that generally means a tablespoon or thereabouts. This is a restrained version; other Boston recipes call for considerably more molasses, and dry mustard is a common addition. Unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which turns bitter over eight hours.
- The vesselA narrow-necked earthenware bean pot loses less water than a wide dish; a heavy lidded Dutch oven is the closest modern equivalent. Keep it covered for all but the last hour, then uncover to darken the top and thicken the liquid.
- Soaking and hard waterTwelve hours cold is right, though the beans should be brought to a simmer and held until the skins crack before baking, or a slow oven alone may never soften them. Very hard water or old beans can leave them stubborn no matter how long they bake.
Baked beans belong to the New England Saturday: the pot went into the falling heat of a brick oven or the back of the range on Saturday afternoon, was eaten that night with brown bread, and fed the household cold on Sunday, when the Sabbath forbade cooking. Molasses is the regional signature and the trade signature — Boston was a molasses port, distilling it into rum and stirring the rest into everything from gingerbread to beans — and its presence here rather than sugar is what separates the Boston pot from a plain pork-and-bean stew. Native New Englanders are generally credited with the technique of long, slow bean cookery in a covered pit, a lineage that colonial cooks are often said to have adapted to the brick oven, though the documentary trail is thin. By the time this book was printed the dish was famous enough to be shorthand for the city itself, and a cookbook could get away with a recipe of four sentences because every reader already knew how it should look.