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Baked Beans (Lb navy beans boiled)
1 lb. navy beans boiled with bacon rind until done 1 t mustard 1 bottle chilli sauce Mrs. Ruby Treptow.
Sugar to taste Salt Pepper 1 small onion, chopped Place in a pan to bake. Cover top with little patties made out of pork sausage; put in oven, and bake until sausage is done.
A community-cookbook shortcut version of baked beans: the long molasses-and-salt-pork bake replaced by bottled chili sauce and a lid of sausage patties. The original assumes you already know how to cook a pot of beans, and gives no oven temperature or time.
- Start the beans the night beforeOne pound of dried navy beans wants an overnight soak, then simmering with the bacon rind until tender but not collapsing, roughly 1 to 1.5 hours. Beans that go in underdone are slow to soften once the acidic chili sauce is added, so get them tender first.
- "1 t mustard"Most likely a teaspoon of dry mustard powder, the usual reading in a bean pot of this kind. Prepared yellow mustard works but is milder and adds vinegar.
- Bottled chilli sauceNot a hot sauce. This is the thick, sweet tomato condiment sold beside the ketchup, in a bottle of about 12 oz; the whole bottle goes in. It supplies the tomato, vinegar and most of the seasoning.
- Sugar to tasteStart at 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and taste; the chili sauce is already sweet. Season the beans while they are still hot from the pot, before the sausage goes on.
- Reserve some cooking liquidKeep a cup of the bean water. The mixture should be loose and saucy going into the pan, since it will thicken considerably in the oven.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F, uncovered, for 45 minutes to an hour, which is enough to set the beans and cook the sausage through.
- The sausage pattiesMake them thin and small, an ounce or so each, so they cook through in the same time the beans need. Bulk pork sausage should reach 160F; thick patties will still be pink inside when the beans are done.
- YieldA pound of dry beans, once cooked, fills a large baking dish (a 9x13 will take it comfortably), serving roughly eight to ten as a side or six as a supper dish.
Baked beans with a sweet tomato element and a meat topping are a familiar potluck and church-supper dish, and this version shows how mid-century bottled goods reshaped an older one. Traditional New England baked beans depended on salt pork, molasses and a very long slow bake; here the bacon rind survives as a nod to the pork fat, but the sweetness and acidity come from a bottle of commercial chili sauce, a product widely available in American groceries from the late nineteenth century onward. The pork sausage patties baked on top turn a side dish into something that can hold the middle of a potluck table. Recipes credited by name to the woman who contributed them, as this one is to Mrs. Ruby Treptow, are characteristic of community-compiled cookbooks.