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Baked Beans
Wash 2 quarts of small white beans, put them in a saucepan, cover with cold water; as soon as they come to a boil, drain; put them in a fireproof baking dish, add 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1 chopped onion, salt and pepper to taste and 1/4 teaspoon mustard, fill dish with boiling water, cover tight, and bake from 5 to 6 hours; add more water as required to keep from getting dry. They can be warmed over as needed.
A plain, meatless bean pot from a Crisco promotional cookbook. The method is sound but the original omits both an oven temperature and any soaking step, and the quantity is far larger than most households now cook.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the recipe simply assumes a low oven for the afternoon. A modern equivalent is around 300F, or 275F if you are going the full six hours. Much hotter and you will be topping up water constantly and may still have firm beans.
- Soak firstThe recipe goes straight from washing to a boil-and-drain. An overnight soak, or a one-hour rest off the heat after the initial boil, gives far more even cooking and shortens the bake. The drain step is worth keeping either way; it removes the starch and oligosaccharides that come out first.
- QuantityTwo quarts of dried beans is roughly 3 1/2 to 4 lb, which yields something like 5 quarts cooked, enough for sixteen to twenty servings. Halving or quartering is sensible unless you genuinely intend to warm them over all week.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched a few years before this book and the reason the book exists. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works; 4 tablespoons for this much bean is a light hand, and salt pork or bacon would be the traditional choice if you are not keeping it meatless.
- Salt timingAcid slows softening badly, so add no tomato or molasses until the beans are tender. Salt is often said to do the same, though this is disputed and salted water is not now thought to hinder softening.
- "Fireproof baking dish" and "cover tight"A bean pot or a heavy lidded casserole. The tight cover is what makes the long bake work; if your lid is loose, seal with foil under it, and check the water level every hour or so as instructed.
- TimingFive to six hours suits a low oven with unsoaked beans. Soaked beans in a modern oven may be done in three to four. Judge by texture, not the clock: a bean should crush easily against the roof of the mouth.
- Keeping"Warmed over as needed" meant a cool larder. Refrigerate within two hours and use within four days, or freeze in portions.
This is a Boston-style bean pot stripped of its two defining ingredients: the salt pork and the molasses. What replaces them is Crisco, and that substitution is the whole point of the book. A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s to demonstrate that their new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening could stand in for lard, butter and pork fat across an entire year of menus. Recipes of this kind had a second audience the publisher was happy to have: an all-vegetable fat made the dish acceptable to households keeping kosher, and Procter & Gamble did advertise Crisco to Jewish buyers on exactly that ground. The slow all-day bake itself predates the tin: baked beans are traditionally described as a Saturday dish in New England, the pot sitting in the cooling brick oven so that food need not be cooked on the Sabbath, though that account is more often repeated than documented.