Home › Fireless Cookery › Baked Beans (Clean the beans and soak)
Baked Beans (Clean the beans and soak)
Clean the beans and soak in cold water over night. Drain off this water and add enough fresh water to cover them. Add a half pound of salt pork to each quart of beans (measured before soaking); add salt, pepper and molasses or sugar to suit taste. Boil for ten or fifteen minutes; place kettle in cooker for six or eight hours. Remove to earthen dish and bake for two hours or until beans are well browned.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: the beans are brought to a hard boil, then set in an insulated box to coast for hours on stored heat before a final browning in the oven. Everything except that middle stage translates directly.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or asbestos, sometimes with a preheated soapstone disc. The pot went in boiling hot and slowly gave up its heat over several hours. A slow cooker on low is the modern equivalent for this step, and it holds temperature rather than losing it.
- The insulated hold is the part to skipBeans and salt pork left in an insulated box for six to eight hours cool gradually, and toward the end of that stretch the pot can sit at temperatures where spore-forming bacteria multiply; the later baking will not reliably undo that. Cook the soaked beans and pork covered in a slow cooker on low, or in a 300F oven, until tender.
- ProportionsA quart of dried beans is 4 cups, about 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb, and takes a half pound of salt pork. That yields 8 to 10 servings.
- Salt porkStill sold, usually as a fatty slab near the bacon. Score the rind and bury it in the beans, or cut it into cubes. Unsmoked streaky bacon or a piece of fresh pork belly plus extra salt will stand in; smoked bacon changes the flavour noticeably.
- Unmeasured sweeteningThe molasses is left to taste. Recipes in this line vary widely, from a spoonful to half a cup or more; for a quart of beans, 1/3 to 1/2 cup is a reasonable starting point, less if you are using sugar as well.
- Add molasses late if the beans are stubbornMolasses is acidic, and acid slows the softening of bean skins. If your beans are old or your water is hard, cook them until nearly tender before stirring in the molasses.
- The browningThe recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven of about 325F will brown the beans over the two hours. Keep the beans just covered with liquid until the last half hour, then let the top dry and crust.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between roughly 1900 and 1920, promoted in cookbooks and home-economics pamphlets as a way to save fuel and to keep a summer kitchen cool: you brought a pot to the boil on the range, sealed it in an insulated box, and left it while you worked or slept. Baked beans were the standard demonstration dish, since the long slow phase that a bean pot wants was exactly what the box supplied, and the New England habit of setting beans overnight in the cooling brick oven had already trained cooks to expect it. The salt pork and molasses mark this as the Boston line of the dish, a combination that goes back to the colonial period when both were staples of the West Indies trade, and the final browning in an earthenware dish preserves the crust that a covered pot alone will not give.