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Beans, Haricot, Boston Baked
This is a famous and universally popular American dish. Take one quart of haricot beans, pick them over carefully, wash, and soak all night in cold water. In the morning put them on in a saucepan and partially boil them, until they begin to split open, which will take about half an hour. Then drain off the water and put the beans into a two-quart round brown earthenware jar. Take one pound of pickled pork, slash the top of it, and bury it in the middle of the beans. Season with a little salt, but not too much, as the pork is salt. Then cover with boiling water and put the jar, without a lid, into the oven. Let them cook slowly all day long while the fire is alight, occasionally pouring on a little boiling water as they get dry. By night they will be sufficiently done. They may either be served in an entree dish with the pork in the middle, or be sent to table with a napkin arranged neatly round the jar. No boiling water should be added for an hour or two before they are taken from the oven, or they will not be brown. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A long, slow, unattended bake that assumes a coal range kept alight from breakfast to supper. In a modern oven the whole thing hinges on holding a genuinely low temperature and on leaving the pot uncovered and dry at the end so the top browns.
- A quart of haricotsDry beans measured by volume; as an imperial quart that is nearer 4 3/4 cups, around 2 lb. Haricot here means any small white bean — navy or Great Northern are the usual modern stand-ins. Enough for eight or so servings.
- "Cook slowly all day"The book gives no oven term, only slow cooking from morning to night; in a modern oven the equivalent is a very low setting, roughly 250-300F. The beans should end tender with the liquid thick rather than soupy.
- Pickled porkThis is salt pork — belly or shoulder cured in brine, not smoked. Supermarket salt pork or a piece of unsmoked streaky bacon works. Slashing the rind lets the fat render into the beans, so score it deeply.
- The bean potThe recipe asks for a two-quart round brown earthenware jar; a stoneware bean pot is the closest thing sold now. Any stoneware or a small enamelled cast-iron pot will do, used without a lid as directed.
- The browning ruleThe instruction not to add water for the last hour or two is the point of the dish. The exposed beans and pork rind dry, caramelise and take on colour; keep topping up and you get pale stewed beans.
- ParboilingHalf an hour, until the skins begin to split, is what the recipe asks and it is worth doing: beans that go into the oven raw can stay stubborn for hours, particularly in hard water.
- No sweeteningUnusually, this version has no molasses, treacle or brown sugar. Period American recipes commonly include a few tablespoons, and often mustard besides; the result here will be plainer and saltier.
- SaltThe recipe allows a little, warning against more because the pork is salt. Taste in the last hour, once the liquid has reduced and concentrated, before adding any.
Baked beans belong to the New England Saturday-night supper, cooked in the residual heat of the week's oven so that nothing needed doing on the Sabbath; Boston's association with the dish was strong enough for the city to acquire the nickname Beantown, though when that name took hold is uncertain and it is often tied to later tourist promotion. Whether the practice descends from Native American beans cooked in earth pits with maple sugar, as is often said, or simply from English pease-and-pork pottage adapted to a New World staple, is not settled. What is clear from this entry is that Cassell's is reporting a foreign speciality to British readers rather than recording a home tradition: the tone is explanatory, the pork is Englished into "pickled pork", and the molasses that a Boston cook would likely have taken for granted has quietly dropped out. The suggestion of sending the jar to table wrapped in a napkin is pure British dining-room manners applied to a farmhouse dish.