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High-Pressure Dinners: Bostonians
Did you ever stop to think that even Boston baked beans are really boiled, not High-Pressure Dinners baked? For even in the Boston way the beans are first parboiled, put into the bean pot with hot water added, and so boiled instead of baked in the oven.
Here is where my pet, the pressure cooker, best shows off his time-cutting qualities. For the parboiling process two cups of beans are washed and soaked in lukewarm water for an hour or two, then put into the cooker with a teaspoonful of soda and two cupfuls of boiling water to parboil. The cover is clamped on, and the pressure run up to twenty pounds, where it is held for five minutes by turning the gas lower. After this cooking, drain off the water, add more hot water to rinse, and again drain the beans. Now pour the beans into a bean pot and add a quarter of a pound of salt pork scalded and cut into small pieces. To half a cup of hot water add three tablespoonfuls of molasses, one eighth teaspoonful of ginger, one eighth teaspoonful of mustard, and one teaspoonful of salt. Pour this over the beans, and if necessary add more water until you can see it.
Place the bean pot inside of the cooker, on the wire rack, and add two cupfuls of hot water. Let the pressure run up to fifteen pounds. Turn down the flame so that the pressure remains steady at fifteen pounds for an hour and a half.
When the beans are taken out of the pot, they have the rich, brown color and the identical flavor of real Boston baked beans - such at least was the verdict of two Bostonians who happened to be the victims of this experiment.
To have baked beans for dinner and only start them soaking at three o'clock in the afternoon and use but one gas flame for less than two hours instead of eight hours of oven heat is certainly worth while. Is it any wonder that I am fond of my pet?
This is a pot-in-pot method: the bean pot sits on a rack inside the pressure cooker, so the beans cook in steam rather than in direct contact with the heat. Two details need translating before you attempt it — the pressure figures and the fact that modern cookers behave differently from a 1920s hand-clamped model.
- Twenty pounds is off the modern scaleConsumer pressure cookers today, stovetop and electric alike, are built to run at 15 psi or less; electric models usually top out near 11-12 psi. There is no way to reach the 20 pounds called for in the parboil, and no reason to try. Do the parboil at whatever high setting your cooker offers, or in an open pot.
- The soda is optional and does more harm than goodBaking soda in the soaking or parboiling water raises the pH and softens skins fast, which is why it appears here alongside a five-minute pressure parboil. It also flattens flavour, degrades thiamine and turns beans slimy if overdone. Since the water is drained and the beans rinsed twice, you can simply leave it out.
- Pot-in-pot timingAn hour and a half at 15 psi is long because the inner pot heats indirectly and the molasses slows softening — acid and sugar both toughen bean skins. If you cook the beans directly in the cooker liquid instead, soaked navy beans with pork and molasses need roughly 12-20 minutes at high pressure plus a natural release.
- If you have no bean potAny heatproof, straight-sided dish that clears the lid by an inch will do -- a stoneware crock or a stainless bowl, big enough to take the swollen beans and their liquid with room to spare. It must sit on a rack, never on the bare bottom of the cooker, and the two cups of water outside it must not boil away.
- Salt pork, scaldedScalding means pouring boiling water over the pork to draw off surface salt and firm the fat before dicing. A quarter pound is about 115 g. Unsmoked slab bacon or fresh pork belly with a little extra salt is the nearest supermarket substitute.
- Beans and liquidTwo cups of dry navy or pea beans is about 400 g and will roughly double. "Add more water until you can see it" means the liquid should just come to the top of the beans — under pressure there is no evaporation, so resist adding more than that or the finished beans will be soupy.
- Release and colourLet the pressure fall on its own rather than venting it; a fast release makes bean skins split. Pressure-cooked beans tend to come out paler than oven-baked ones, though the author claims her testers could not tell the difference. If you want a darker top, uncover the pot and give it 20 minutes in a hot oven at the end.
- YieldServes four to six as a main dish, more as a side. The beans keep well and reheat better than they cook the first time.
Boston baked beans belong to a New England pattern of Saturday cooking: a pot of beans with salt pork and molasses set in the fading heat of the week's oven, eaten Saturday night and again cold on Sunday when no work was done. The molasses is the tell — it arrived in Massachusetts by the barrel through the West Indies trade, and it is what distinguishes the Boston pot from the maple-sweetened Vermont version and the plain salt-pork beans of further inland. The author's point that the dish is really boiled is fair enough: a covered bean pot full of liquid in a slow oven is a braise, and the eight hours it traditionally took were the whole objection. Pressure cookers were being sold to American households in the 1910s and 1920s as a solution to exactly this problem, and a book called Kitchenette Cookery is aimed squarely at the apartment dweller with one or two gas burners, no oven worth heating, and no interest in spending a day on beans.