Home › Sandwiches › Boston Sandwiches
Boston Sandwiches
To half a cupful of baked beans add three tablespoonfuls of grated American cheese, a teaspoonful of lemon juice, two of orange juice and a little salt. Mash together and spread on thin round slices of buttered brown bread. Cut in pie-shaped pieces before being spread.
A bean-paste spread, essentially a Depression-era answer to the question of what to do with Saturday night's leftovers. It comes together in five minutes and needs almost nothing translated.
- "American cheese"In this period the phrase meant a firm domestic cheddar, the kind sold in a block and grated, not the processed slices in plastic. Use a sharp yellow cheddar; the flavor has to carry against the beans.
- The beansBoston baked beans — navy beans slow-baked with molasses, brown sugar and salt pork. Canned baked beans work; drain off most of the sauce first or the spread will be too loose to hold on bread.
- Brown breadAlmost certainly Boston brown bread, the steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf that comes out as a cylinder, which is why the recipe calls for thin round slices cut into wedges. A whole-wheat sandwich loaf will taste right but you lose the round shape and the pie-piece cut stops making sense.
- Order of operationsThe last line matters: cut the rounds into wedges before spreading, not after. Spreading first and cutting after drags the filling across the crumb.
- The citrusA teaspoon of lemon and two of orange against half a cup of beans is a small enough quantity that it likely reads as a corrective to the molasses sweetness rather than as fruit. Taste before adding salt — baked beans and cheddar are both already salty.
- TextureMash with a fork to a coarse paste rather than pureeing. If it stiffens in the refrigerator, a few drops more juice loosens it.
- YieldHalf a cup of beans plus cheese makes roughly three-quarters of a cup of spread — enough for four to six brown bread rounds, so sixteen to twenty-four wedges. Best eaten the day it is made.
Boston brown bread and baked beans are so firmly linked that Saturday supper in New England traditionally meant both on the same table, the bread steamed in a can or pudding mold while the bean pot sat in the oven. A sandwich that combines the two is straightforwardly a leftovers dish given a city's name, and the practice of naming spreads after places — Boston, Manhattan — was common in the sandwich chapters of early twentieth-century American cookbooks, when sandwiches had moved from picnic food into the repertoire of the bridge table and the afternoon tea tray. The grated cheese and the small hit of citrus suggest, though one can only guess at the intention, that this was meant as a company dish rather than a lunchbox one: someone may have wanted the beans to read as a canapé.