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Boston Baked Beans
Pick over one quart pea beans, cover with cold water, and soak over night. In morning, drain, cover with fresh water, heat slowly (keeping water below boiling-point), and cook until skins will burst, - which is best determined by taking a few beans on the tip of a spoon and blowing on them, when skins will burst if sufficiently cooked. Beans thus tested must, of course, be thrown away. Drain beans, throwing bean-water out of doors, not in sink. Scald rind of three-fourths pound fat salt pork, scrape, remove one-fourth inch slice and put in bottom of bean-pot. Cut through rind of remaining pork every one-half inch, making cuts one inch deep. Put beans in pot and bury pork in beans, leaving rind exposed. Mix one tablespoon salt, one tablespoon molasses, and three tablespoons sugar; add one cup boiling water, and pour over beans; then add enough more boiling water to cover beans. Cover bean-pot, put in oven, and bake slowly six or eight hours, uncovering the last hour of cooking, that rind may become brown and crisp. Add water as needed. Many feel sure that by adding with seasonings one-half tablespoon mustard, the beans are more easily digested. If pork mixed with lean is preferred, use less salt.
The fine reputation which Boston Baked Beans have gained has been attributed to the earthen bean-pot with small top and bulging sides in which they are supposed to be cooked. Equally good beans have often been eaten where a five-pound lard pail was substituted for the broken bean-pot.
Yellow-eyed beans are very good when baked.
Fannie Farmer's method still works exactly as written; what needs translating is the vessel, the oven setting, and a couple of instructions that belong to 1896 rather than to food science.
- The hinge: keep the pre-cook below a boilThe initial simmer is what sets the texture. Water at a bare tremble, around 180-190F, loosens the skins without breaking the beans, so they hold their shape through six hours in the oven. A rolling boil at this stage gives you split beans swimming in cloudy liquid.
- QuantitiesOne quart of dried pea (navy) beans is about 1 lb 12 oz to 2 lb. It roughly doubles in volume on soaking, so allow a bean pot or casserole of at least 3 to 4 quarts once the beans are covered with water. It serves eight to ten as a side dish.
- "Bake slowly" means 250-300F"Bake slowly" -- the book gives no oven temperatures, so the setting has to be inferred; 250-300F suits the six-to-eight-hour range, and the beans should never bubble hard, only sigh at the edges. If the pork rind has not crisped during the final uncovered hour, the heat can be raised for a short time at the end.
- Salt porkThree-quarters of a pound of fat salt pork is still sold by many butchers and by some supermarkets, usually in a slab. Scalding and scraping the rind was to clean it; modern packaged salt pork needs only a rinse. Unsmoked is correct here -- bacon makes a different, smokier dish.
- Cut the salt backA full tablespoon of salt plus 3/4 lb of salt pork is more than most palates now want. Start with a teaspoon, and add more at the end once the pork has given up its cure. Farmer's own note about using less salt with leaner pork points the same direction.
- The bean waterFarmer gives no reason for throwing the cooking water outdoors rather than down the sink; the likeliest explanation is a 19th-century concern about what bean water did to drains. Pour it wherever you like; there is nothing wrong with the sink.
- The potA traditional bean pot's narrow neck limits evaporation. A lidded Dutch oven or covered casserole of similar capacity does much the same job. Check the water level every couple of hours and top up with boiling water so the beans stay just submerged.
- MustardThere is no evidence that the half tablespoon of dry mustard aids digestion, but it sharpens the molasses and sugar noticeably. Worth adding on flavor grounds alone.
Baked beans were a New England Saturday-night institution long before this book recorded them, a practice often tied to the Puritan prohibition on Sabbath cooking: a pot set in the cooling brick oven on Saturday afternoon fed the household through Sunday without labor. Molasses, cheap and abundant in Boston through the West Indies trade, gave the local version its dark sweetness, and is often said to lie behind the city's nickname Beantown. Her aside about the five-pound lard pail is characteristic of her: she was running a cooking school for women who might not own the correct earthenware, and she was more interested in whether the beans came out right than in the mystique of the pot.