Baked Beans
Soak over night in cold water. In the morning drain and add 2 quarts of fresh water for each quart of beans, and a piece of salt pork; boil hard on coal or gas stove 10 or 15 minutes; remove quickly to cabinet for 3 or 4 hours; then take from cabinet and boil hard 10 minutes more and return to cabinet for 3 or 4 hours longer; pour into bake dish and brown in oven.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe: the beans are brought to a hard boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box that holds the heat while the pot coasts down over several hours. Everything about the method follows from that one piece of equipment, which almost nobody owns now.
- What the "cabinet" isA fireless cooker (also called a heat-retaining or hay box) — an insulated wooden chest with a nest for the hot pot, sometimes with a preheated soapstone disc. It cooks nothing on its own; it only slows the pot's heat loss, which is why the recipe boils hard twice to recharge it.
- Modern equivalentA covered Dutch oven at 275-300F for 5-6 hours, or a slow cooker on low for 8, gives the same long soft simmer with better temperature control. The final browning step is a hot dry oven, around 375-400F uncovered until the top crusts.
- Watch the hold temperatureA retained-heat box that starts below boiling, or an underfilled pot, can drift into the 40-140F range where bacteria multiply. If you do use one, the pot must go in at a rolling boil, full, and be reheated to a boil on schedule as written.
- Proportions and yieldTwo quarts water to one quart dried beans is roughly 8 cups water to about 2 lb of beans. A quart of dried beans swells to feed eight to ten.
- Salt pork"A piece" is vague; period recipes vary, commonly somewhere between a quarter and a half pound per quart of beans, scored through the rind and buried in the pot so the fat renders through. Salt pork is still sold, but a slab of unsmoked streaky bacon behaves much the same way.
- Skip the soaking waterThe instruction to drain and use fresh water is right, and worth keeping. It removes some of the oligosaccharides responsible for the usual complaint about beans.
- No molasses hereUnlike most Boston-style recipes, this one adds no molasses, sugar or mustard. If you want them, add them at the start of the last long hold — sweeteners and any acid slow the softening of the skins, so beans that meet them early can stay stubborn.
- Salt at the endThe pork carries most of the seasoning, and how salty it is varies. Taste before the browning step rather than trusting the recipe's silence on salt.
Recipes of this shape belong to the fireless-cooker boom of roughly 1905 to 1920, when insulated cabinets were sold and home-built by the thousand as a way to cut coal and gas bills and keep the kitchen cool in summer. Cookbooks and utility-company booklets of the period routinely printed a "cabinet" version of any dish that would tolerate long, gentle heat: oatmeal, stewed beef, and above all baked beans, which had traditionally spent the night in a cooling brick oven and so adapted to the box without any change in character. The New England habit of Saturday-night beans with salt pork is generally traced to Sabbath practice, the pot going into the residual heat of the week's baking so that no fire need be tended on Sunday; the fireless cooker simply mechanised the same idea. The plainness of this particular version — beans, water, pork, and a browning at the end — marks it as a fuel-economy recipe rather than a festive one.