Baked Beans
1 Quart Pea Beans 1/3 Teaspoonful Soda 1/2 Cupful Snowdrift (scant) 1½ Tablespoonfuls Salt 1/2 Teaspoonful Pepper 1 Teaspoonful Mustard 1 Medium-sized Onion, Sliced 1/4 Cupful Molasses 1 Cupful Canned Tomatoes, or Tomato Sauce (optional) Soak the beans over night, then wash them well and put them on to cook in boiling water to cover, to which the soda. has been added. When the skins are loosened, drain them, place them in a bean pot with the remaining ingredients, barely cover with boiling water, put on the lid and cook very slowly for about six hours, in a slow oven, 300 degrees F. If necessary, water may be added during the cookery to keep the beans from becoming dry.
NOTE:-Any cold, left-over Baked Beans may be made into little flat cakes, rolled in flour and browned on each side in Snowdrift, then served with Tomato Sauce.
A meatless bean pot from a shortening manufacturer's promotional book, which is why fat stands in for the usual salt pork. The instructions are sound; the ingredient list has suffered at the hands of the scanner.
- SaltThe soda and salt quantities were checked against the printed page and read as given. One and a half tablespoons of salt is high by modern taste for a quart of beans; start with two teaspoons and correct at the end of the bake.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later formulations), the reason this book exists. Substitute any solid vegetable shortening, or use 1/2 cup of a neutral oil, or go traditional with 4 oz of salt pork scored and buried in the pot.
- Pea beansThe small white bean now sold as navy bean. A quart dry is roughly 1 3/4 lb and will yield close to 3 quarts cooked — ten to twelve servings. Halve it for a household.
- The sodaBaking soda in the parboil softens skins fast in hard water, but alkali also attacks thiamine and can leave beans mushy and slightly soapy if overdone. Keep it to roughly half a teaspoon per quart, and drain the beans well before they go in the pot, as the recipe directs (the washing it calls for comes before the soda parboil, not after).
- Skins loosenedThe test is old and reliable: lift a few beans on a spoon and blow across them. If the skins peel back and split, the parboil is done, usually 10-20 minutes. Beans that go into the pot underdone will be slow to soften once molasses and tomato acid are added.
- Acid and molassesBoth molasses and canned tomato slow the softening of bean skins. If your beans are old or your water is hard, expect the long end of the six hours, and keep the lid on so the top layer does not dry out and toughen.
- Oven and vessel300F is given outright, and it is right. A lidded bean pot, a Dutch oven or any deep covered casserole works; the narrow-mouthed shape of a bean pot simply limits evaporation. Uncover for the last 30–45 minutes if you want a browned crust.
- Water"Barely cover" means the liquid sits just level with the beans. Check every couple of hours and top up with boiling water -- cold water added to a hot pot stalls the cooking.
- The bean cakesThe note at the end is the best part of the recipe. Mash the cold beans coarsely so the cakes hold, form them no thicker than half an inch, flour lightly and fry in shallow fat over medium heat until crusted on both sides.
Snowdrift was one of the vegetable shortenings promoted to American cooks in the early twentieth century, and its recipe booklets had a clear job: show cooks that the new fat could do everything lard and butter did. Baked beans were an obvious target. The New England bean pot had long been built on salt pork -- the fat lubricated the beans through their long slow bake and provided much of the seasoning -- so replacing it with half a cup of shortening was a direct argument for the product. The rest of the formula is conventional for its period: molasses rather than sugar, dry mustard, an onion, and the long 300F bake, which is usually linked to the practice of setting the pot in a cooling brick oven on Saturday and drawing it out for supper. The optional cup of tomato suggests a twentieth-century recipe rather than a nineteenth-century one; canned tomato was cheap and widely available by then, and tomato-sauced beans were already familiar from the tinned pork and beans on the market.