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Mother's Baked Beans
1 qt. Navy beans 1/2 lb. salt pork 1 tablespoon salt 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1 tablespoon molasses Wash and pick the beans over and soak over night. In the morning drain, cover with cold water; bring slowly to the boiling point and parboil for half an hour. To test, take up a spoonful and blow on them, if the skin curls back they are done. Drain in colander; place in a two-quart earthen bean pot a layer of the beans, then add the salt pork, which has been previously washed, and gashed across the top; fill the pot up with the beans. Dissolve the seasonings and molasses in a cup of hot water, pour over the beans, then fill the pot with hot water, cover and bake from six to eight hours, renewing the water as it cooks away until nearly done, then let the water cook away.
A plain New England bean pot recipe from a flour-company promotional booklet, written for a cook who already knew what a slow oven felt like. Two things need filling in: the temperature and the fact that a quart of dry beans will not fit in a two-quart pot once cooked.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given; the original simply says "bake." A slow oven, 275-300F, for the full six to eight hours suits it. Hotter than that and the water boils away faster than the beans soften, and the skins toughen instead of collapsing.
- Pot sizeA quart of dry beans is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb and swells to something like 10-12 cups cooked. Use a 4-quart bean pot or Dutch oven; the two-quart pot in the original will not hold the beans plus the water they need to absorb.
- The blow testThis is the hinge of the recipe and it is worth trusting. Lift a spoonful, blow across it, and if the skins wrinkle and peel back the parboil is done. Beans that go into the pot underparboiled may still be firm after eight hours, since molasses is generally held to slow softening.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt on top of half a pound of salt pork is a lot by current palates. Start with a teaspoon or two, taste near the end, and add more then.
- Mustard"Mustard" here means dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Half a teaspoon in a quart of beans is a background note rather than a flavour you will identify.
- Salt porkStill sold, usually near the bacon; look for a piece with clear layers of lean rather than pure fat. Washing it removes surface cure, and the gashes let it render into the beans. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or a chunk of pancetta will stand in, though the result is less sweetly porky.
- Water managementKeep the beans just covered with boiling water for the first five or six hours, topping up as needed, then stop adding and let the liquid reduce, as the original directs. The recipe keeps the pot covered throughout; uncovering for the last hour to brown the top is a modern addition, not part of the text.
- YieldServes eight to ten as a side. The molasses is restrained at one tablespoon; if you want the darker, sweeter Boston style, more molasses is a legitimate change rather than a correction.
Baked beans in an earthen pot are among the most durable dishes of the New England kitchen, and the pattern here — navy beans, salt pork, molasses, dry mustard, a very long slow bake — is the standard one. The traditional explanation ties it to the Puritan Sabbath: beans went into the oven on Saturday so that a hot meal could be had on Sunday without cooking, which is why baked beans and brown bread were long a Saturday-night institution in Boston and beyond. Molasses, cheap and abundant in the northeastern ports through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did the sweetening that sugar did elsewhere. The dish's appearance in a general household collection of this kind shows how thoroughly it had spread beyond its region, credited, as such recipes often were, to Mother.