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Boston Baked Beans
1 quart beans 1/2 pound salt pork 1 tablespoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard 2 tablespoon molasses Wash and soak beans over night. Put half into bean pot; wash salt pork and place in center; add remainder of beans, salt, pepper, mustard, molasses, and 4 cups cold water; cover. Put into slow oven and bake 8 hours. Add more water if needed. Mustard is a matter of taste and may be omitted.
A plain New England bean pot recipe that assumes a wood or coal range holding low heat all day. It works in a modern oven with almost no change, provided the temperature is genuinely low and the pot never goes dry.
- The hinge: keep water over the beansBeans exposed above the water line dry out and harden, and their skins toughen; acidic molasses slows softening further. Check every couple of hours and add boiling water to keep the beans just covered until the last hour, when you can let the top brown.
- "Slow oven"250-300F. At 325F or above the liquid reduces faster than the beans soften and you get scorched molasses at the edges.
- A quart of beansMeasured dry, that is 4 cups, roughly 1 3/4 lb. Navy or pea beans are the traditional choice; after soaking overnight and eight hours' baking they will serve 10-12 as a side dish.
- Salt porkStill sold, usually in the bacon case as fatty cured pork belly. Score the rind in a crosshatch so fat renders into the pot. Unsmoked is correct here; bacon will taste of smoke the original did not have.
- SaltA tablespoon on top of half a pound of salt pork is a great deal by current taste. Start with a teaspoon or two, and salt again at the end once the pork has given up what it will.
- Bean potA glazed stoneware bean pot is narrow-mouthed to limit evaporation. A heavy Dutch oven with a tight lid does the same job; a wide shallow dish does not and will need water more often.
- SoakingOvernight is the original instruction, and cold water at room temperature is fine. Drain and use fresh water in the pot rather than the soaking liquid.
- MolassesTwo tablespoons is restrained by modern standards, giving a savoury rather than sweet pot. Unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which turns bitter over eight hours.
Baked beans in a covered earthenware pot are the standard Saturday supper of New England, cooked overnight so the household could eat on the Sabbath without kindling a fire, and the dish is closely enough identified with the city that Boston's nickname Beantown is often said to derive from it. The molasses is not incidental: colonial New England distilled West Indian molasses into rum, and cheap molasses was the region's everyday sweetener long after cane sugar reached other American kitchens, which is why the local pot is dark and slightly bitter where a Pennsylvania or Midwestern one tends toward brown sugar. Dry mustard, offered here as optional, was a common cut against the fat of the salt pork.