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Saturday Bean Soup
Baked beans and brown bread form a Sunday breakfast for so many that the following will be a useful and economical soup for Saturday dinner. Put on the pot with more beans than enough for Sunday's breakfast, with water, and slice of salt pork; parboil till beans are ready to be put in oven. Take out pork and part of beans, leaving enough for a bean soup; place the pot on back of stove and keep hot. Three-quarters of an hour before dinner heat soup, add more water and vegetables as in "Bean Soup."
This is less a standalone recipe than a piece of scheduling: it tells you to cook extra beans while preparing Saturday's baked beans and divert part of the pot into soup. To follow it you need the book's "Bean Soup" entry for the vegetable stage.
- The hingeThe beans for the oven are lifted out; the soup portion stays behind in the pot with the cooking liquid. That starchy parboiling water is the whole body of the soup; drain it away and you are left with beans in plain water.
- Beans and soakingThe recipe does not say which bean; a small white bean such as navy or Great Northern suits the purpose. Soak overnight, or bring to a boil and stand off the heat an hour; then parboil roughly 45-60 minutes, until tender enough for the oven -- the traditional test was to blow on a spoonful and watch for the skins to split.
- Salt porkA piece of fatty cured pork belly, unsmoked. Slab bacon is the closest supermarket substitute, though it is smoked and will read differently. Modern salt pork is salty enough that you should not salt the soup until the end.
- "As in Bean Soup"The vegetables are not named here; you need the book's own "Bean Soup" entry, which this recipe simply defers to. Three-quarters of an hour is ample for diced vegetables and lets the beans break down into the liquid.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range this was the cool zone where a pot held temperature for hours without boiling. A modern equivalent is refrigerating the reserved beans and liquid and reheating at dinnertime; holding beans at lukewarm for several hours is not a habit worth reviving.
- TextureFor a thicker soup, mash a cup of the beans against the side of the pot or pass them through a sieve and stir back in. The book assumes this kind of judgment rather than stating it.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities. As a rough guide, about two cups of parboiled beans with their liquid, plus vegetables and added water, will make four to six servings.
The premise here is older than the book: baked beans left in a slow oven overnight so that Sunday's breakfast required no cooking, a practice generally traced to New England Sabbath observance, where Saturday's fire did the work for the day of rest. Buckeye Cookery (whose earliest incarnation appeared in Marysville, Ohio in 1876 as the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, with the 1877 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping issued from Minneapolis) is a Midwestern book, but that Yankee rhythm traveled west with settlers, and the writer assumes her readers already keep it -- "a Sunday breakfast for so many" needs no explanation. What the entry really demonstrates is the economy that runs through the whole volume: one fire, one pot of beans, one slice of salt pork, and two meals out of it, with the soup treated as a byproduct of work already being done rather than a separate undertaking.