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Baked Beans
Soak a pint of beans all night in water that is warm when poured over them. In the morning, boil till tender. Chop onehalf pound parboiled salt pork very fine. Make a tomato sauce by stirring into a cup of strained tomatoes a tablespoon of butter rolled in one of flour, and, when it is thick, season with sugar, salt, onion juice and pepper to taste. In the bottom of a deep baking dish put a layer of the minced pork, then a thick layer of beans, and pour over them a little of the sauce. Proceed in this way till the dish is full. Sprinkle the top with minced pork, add enough tomato juice to moisten well. Bake in a covered dish two and one-half hours, then uncover and brown.
— Mrs. Wm. H. Van Orden
A tomato-sauced variant of New England baked beans, contributed to a Catskill village collection. The method is sound; the measurements assume a cook who already knows what beans look like when done.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; period community cookbooks often left it to the cook's judgement of her own range. A moderate covered bake, around 300-325F for the two and a half hours, then uncovered at about 400F for the last 20 minutes to brown, will suit.
- A pint of beansDried beans were sold and measured by volume: a pint is about 14 oz, or 2 cups. Navy or pea beans are the period default. They will roughly triple in volume, so use a 2- to 3-quart baking dish.
- Parboiled salt porkSalt pork is fatty side pork cured in dry salt, still sold in slabs near the bacon. Parboiling for 5-10 minutes pulls out enough salt that the finished dish is seasoned rather than brined; skip it and the dish is likely to come out very salty. Bacon is a poor substitute, being smoked and much leaner.
- Boil till tender, but not softBoil till tender -- The recipe's pre-boil is followed by two and a half hours in the oven, so it is worth stopping while the beans still hold their shape and the skins are unsplit - roughly 45 minutes to an hour on soaked beans. Beans boiled all the way soft may break down in the bake.
- Acid and beansAcid slows bean skins from softening further, so make sure the beans are genuinely tender before the tomato goes anywhere near them.
- Strained tomatoes and tomato juice"Strained tomatoes" means tomatoes pressed through a sieve to remove skin and seed - passata or plain tomato puree does the job. The "tomato juice" called for at the end is the thinner liquid; thinned puree, or failing that a little of the reserved bean cooking water, will moisten.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion and press the pulp in a sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the slurry. A teaspoon or two is enough for a cup of sauce.
- YieldServes six as a side, four as a supper dish with bread.
Baked beans in the Hudson Valley and Catskills are often said to sit at the meeting point of two traditions: the Dutch-descended households of the region and the New England pot of beans, salt pork and molasses that spread west through the nineteenth century. What marks this version is the tomato. Canned tomatoes became cheap and reliable in American kitchens after the Civil War, and by the time community cookbooks like this one were being compiled, some cooks appear to have substituted a tomato sauce for the older molasses-and-mustard sweetening. The layered construction, pork alternating with beans, is the older bean-pot method transferred to a covered baking dish; the long covered bake followed by an uncovered browning is the sort of thing a slow wood-fired oven did well, and the recipe gives hours rather than degrees.