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Boston Baked Beans
1 pint pea beans
½ teaspoon salt
1 small onion
½ teaspoon dry mustard
⅛ pound salt pork, part fat 2 tablespoons molasses and part lean
Soak beans in cold water overnight; in the morning place them in fresh water to cover and simmer gently until skins begin to burst, being careful that they do not cook long enough to break. When they are soft turn them into a bean-pot. Beans may be put into the pot without this preliminary cooking.
Pour boiling water over the salt pork. Scrape the rind until white, score it in half-inch strips, and bury the meat in the beans, leaving only the rind exposed. Mix together salt, mustard and molasses. Place these in a cup, fill the cup with hot water, stir until well mixed, and pour the liquid over the beans and pork. Add enough water to cover the beans, and bake eight hours, adding water to keep them covered, until the last hour, when the pork should be raised to the surface to crisp.
If pork is disliked, it may be omitted, but more salt must then be used, together with one-third cup of butter or butter substitute or drippings, or half a pound of fat and lean corned beef may be substituted.
A plain, restrained version of the dish — two tablespoons of molasses, no brown sugar, no ketchup. The instructions assume a bean pot in a range oven all day, and they quietly drop one ingredient from the method.
- The onion goes in and is never mentioned againIt appears in the ingredient list but not in the directions. Many versions of the dish bury a peeled whole onion in the pot before the beans go in, where it collapses into the liquid over the long bake; this recipe simply never says what to do with it.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Eight hours implies a slow oven, somewhere around 250-300F in modern terms. Much hotter and the liquid goes faster than you can replace it, and the skins toughen before the interiors go creamy.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint of dried pea beans is about 2 cups, roughly a pound; navy beans are the same thing under a different name. An eighth of a pound of salt pork is 2 ounces — a small piece, scored so the fat renders out.
- The hinge: keep them coveredThe beans must stay under liquid for the first seven hours or the exposed ones dry into pebbles that never soften. Check every hour or so and top up with boiling, not cold, water.
- Salt and molasses go in from the start hereSome cooks hold back salt and acid on the theory they toughen skins. This recipe adds both at the beginning. If you skip the preliminary simmer as the recipe expressly permits, expect the full eight hours to be the minimum rather than the target.
- Blanching the porkThe boiling water poured over the salt pork rinses surface salt and firms the rind for scraping. Salt pork varies in saltiness, so don't skip it, and taste the liquid before adding more salt.
- The last hourLifting the pork to the surface and letting the liquid fall below the beans is what produces the browned, slightly crusted top. The recipe says only to stop adding water; it says nothing either way about covering the pot.
- YieldAbout six servings as a side dish, four as a supper with brown bread.
Baked beans in a covered earthenware pot belong to the New England Saturday-night tradition, generally traced to the practice of cooking a dish that could go into the banked oven before the Sabbath and be eaten cold or reheated the next day, and to the colonial molasses trade that made the sweetener cheap in Boston. The pot itself — narrow-necked, bulbous, glazed inside — was designed to lose as little moisture as possible over a long slow bake, which is why the recipe can call for eight hours without the beans turning to paste. That the Butterick book, a national household compendium tied to a dress-pattern company, includes the dish at all shows how thoroughly a regional supper had become general American cookery by the early twentieth century. The note offering butter, drippings or corned beef in place of salt pork is a small piece of practicality: the fat matters more than its source.