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Baked Bean Soup
3 cups cold baked beans 3 pints water 2 tablespoons butter 2 slices onion 2 stalks celery 1½ cups stewed and strained tomatoes 2 tablespoons flour 1 tablespoon Chili sauce
The page as printed gives only Fannie Farmer's ingredient list; the method that followed it in the book is missing here. What follows fills in the archaic measures and the one or two decisions that determine whether this comes out as soup or as thin chili.
- The method in briefThe printed method is not on this page. On the face of the ingredient list, the beans would be simmered with the water, onion and celery, then pressed through a sieve; the tomato added; the butter and flour used as the thickening; the chili sauce stirred in at the end. Straining is the hinge: baked bean skins will not break down, and unstrained the soup is coarse rather than smooth.
- Three pintsSix cups of water. With three cups of beans that yields roughly two quarts of finished soup, or six to eight servings.
- Cold baked beansThis is a leftovers recipe, written for the Saturday-night bean pot. Boston-style beans carry molasses and salt pork, so the soup arrives already sweet and smoky; canned baked beans work but are sweeter still, and you may want to cut the chili sauce with a little vinegar.
- Chili sauce in 1896Not the modern hot sauce, and not sriracha. Period chili sauce was a thick, mildly spiced tomato relish closer to a chunky ketchup. A tablespoon of ketchup with a pinch of cayenne and a dash of cider vinegar is nearer the original than anything sold as chili sauce today.
- Stewed and strained tomatoesCanned tomato purée or passata, about 1½ cups. The tomato varieties then in use may well have been more acidic than many modern ones; taste before salting.
- SaltNone is listed. The salt pork usual in Boston baked beans would supply some. If your beans are meatless, season at the end once the tomato is in.
- TextureA blender does in ten seconds what the sieve did in ten minutes, but push the purée through a strainer afterward anyway to catch the skins.
Bean soup made from Saturday's baked beans is one of the plainest kinds of New England thrift, and its appearance in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book under "Soups Without Stock" tells you exactly what that chapter was for: dishes for households with no simmering stockpot and no cook to tend one. Farmer took over the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s and published the book in 1896, aiming it at middle-class women running their own kitchens, and its level measurements were part of the same project of making cookery teachable rather than inherited. The baked beans themselves reflect the older Sabbath rhythm of the region, where a pot went into the cooling brick oven on Saturday and fed the family cold on Sunday. Bottled tomato relishes of the chili-sauce kind were widely available by the 1890s, which is roughly when a recipe like this could assume a bottle in the house.