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Baked Beans
1 quart of small, white soup 1 pound of pickled pork, beans, 1 tablespoonful of molasses, ½ teaspoonful of mustard.
Soak the beans over night in cold water. In the morning wash well in a colander, put them into a kettle of cold water, bring quickly to boiling point; drain, throw this water away and cover with freshly boiled water. Score the rind of the pork and put into the kettle of beans; simmer until you may blow the skin off the beans. To do this take three or four beans in your hand, blow hard on them; if the skin cracks they are done; remove and drain at once. Put them into the bean pot, almost bury the pork in the centre, allowing the scored part to remain above the beans. Add a teaspoonful of salt to one pint of the water in which the beans are boiled; then add to it the mustard and molasses and pour over the beans. Put the lid on the bean pot and bake in a moderate oven for from six to eight hours. Add water as that on the beans evaporates. If you wish the beans for Sunday morning's breakfast, it is best to bake in a moderate oven all night.
As many persons are without bean pots and use an ordinary iron baking pan for the operation, they must remember that the pan must be covered carefully and watched closely, or the beans will break and become a soft, sticky mass. Two hours is sufficient time to allow if you use a baking pan. KIDNEY BEANS, à la MAÎTRE d' HOTEL.
Take one quart of freshly shelled kidney beans, cover with boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil gently
A straight New England bean pot recipe: parboil, then bake low and long with salt pork and molasses. The instructions are sound, but the ingredient quantities and a few of the vessels need translating.
- What the quantities actually areRead as: 1 quart small white soup beans (navy or pea beans, roughly 1 3/4 lb dry), 1 lb pickled pork, 1 tablespoon molasses, 1 1/2 teaspoons mustard. A quart of dry beans swells to two or three times its volume, so you need a bean pot of at least four quarts; it will feed a large table.
- Pickled porkThis is fatty pork belly or shoulder cured in brine, not smoked. Salt pork from the supermarket is the closest thing; unsmoked streaky bacon in a single piece also works. If it tastes very salty, soak it an hour in cold water before scoring.
- Oven temperature'Moderate' in period books is usually given as somewhere around 350F; for a bake of six to eight hours, or overnight, work at the low end of that, about 300-325F, or the edges will dry and catch before the centres soften.
- The blow testThe parboil is finished when the skins split as you blow on a few beans in your palm, commonly after half an hour or so. Undercook at this stage and the beans will never soften properly in the oven, since molasses slows the skins from breaking down.
- Discarding the first waterBringing the soaked beans quickly to a boil and throwing that water away is not fussiness. It carries off some of the soluble sugars behind the usual digestive complaint and gives a cleaner-tasting pot.
- Keep the pork proud of the beansThe recipe has the scored rind left above the surface rather than buried, so the fat renders down into the pot and the rind colours.
- WateringCheck every couple of hours and top up with boiling, not cold, water so the beans stay just covered, as the recipe directs.
- Baking pan versus bean potThe recipe allows only two hours in an ordinary iron baking pan, and warns that it must be covered carefully and watched or the beans break into a sticky mass. Cover a metal pan tightly with a lid or foil and expect to add water more often. A modern lidded Dutch oven behaves much like the bean pot.
Baked beans in a covered earthenware pot are the classic Saturday-night dish of New England, and the overnight bake noted here for "Sunday morning's breakfast" is often said to be the reason the method survived: the pot went into the falling heat of the range on Saturday evening and came out ready on the Sabbath, when no cooking was to be done. The small white "soup bean" -- the navy or pea bean -- was the standard sort, cheap, keeping indefinitely dry, and paired with salt pork from the same barrel that supplied most of the winter's meat. Molasses rather than sugar reflects the long New England trade in West Indian molasses; maple syrup appears in some regional versions. The parboil-and-blow test was a kitchen gauge used before thermometers and timers were common, and it remains a better guide than the clock.