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Saturday Bean Soup
Baked beans and brown bread form a Sunday breakfast for so many that the following will be a useful and economical soup for Saturday dinner. Put on the pot with more beans than enough for Sunday's breakfast, with water, and slice of salt pork; parboil till beans are ready to be put in oven. Take out pork and part of beans, leaving enough for a bean soup; place the pot on back of stove and keep hot. Three-quarters of an hour before dinner heat soup, add more water and vegetables as in "Bean Soup."
This is a piggyback recipe: it assumes you are already cooking a pot of beans for Sunday and simply tells you to cook more than you need. The instructions are deliberately thin, so a few numbers help.
- The hinge: cook one pot, split it two waysEverything depends on parboiling enough beans for both dishes at once. Start with about twice what the baked-bean pot needs — figure 1 lb dried navy or Great Northern beans for a batch of baked beans plus roughly 6 servings of soup.
- Soak firstThe original says nothing about soaking, though many period baked-bean recipes call for it. Cover the beans by three inches of cold water and leave them 8 to 12 hours, or use the quick method: boil one minute, then stand off the heat one hour.
- "Parboil till beans are ready to be put in oven"That means simmering until the skins split and the beans are tender to the bite but not falling apart — 45 minutes to an hour for soaked beans. The soup portion then finishes cooking later, so slightly underdone is correct.
- Salt porkA slab of fatty cured pork belly, sold in some supermarkets near the bacon. Unsmoked pancetta or a piece of thick-cut bacon works; salt levels vary between products, so hold back on salt until the end.
- "Vegetables as in Bean Soup"The instruction points to a companion bean soup recipe not reproduced here; period bean soups generally take chopped onion, carrot and celery, with a little of the parboiled pork or its fat for flavour. Add them at the start of the three-quarter-hour reheat so they cook through.
- "Back of the stove"On a wood range, the far side of the top was a warm holding zone. The point was to keep the pot hot for hours without cooking further. In a modern kitchen, cool the beans and refrigerate them until dinner rather than holding them lukewarm all afternoon — several hours between 40 and 140F is exactly the range to avoid.
- FinishingThin with hot water or the bean liquor to the thickness you want, and season with black pepper. Mashing or briefly blending a cupful of the beans gives body without flour.
- YieldAs written, enough soup for a family dinner — about 6 bowls, served with the brown bread already in the house for Sunday.
The whole logic of this recipe rests on the New England Sabbath, when cooking was customarily avoided on Sunday: a pot of beans went into the cooling brick oven late on Saturday and fed the household through Saturday supper, Sunday breakfast and often Sunday dinner, with brown bread steamed alongside. The soup here is the thrift dividend — a second dish extracted from a single fire and a single pot of beans, which is exactly the kind of economy the compilers of nineteenth-century household cook books prized. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book is a reminder that volumes in this particular publishing line were assembled in good part by borrowing: publishers reissued and recombined material from Northern compilations (this one shares a great deal with the Buckeye Cookery family of books) under regional titles, so a distinctly Yankee Saturday-night habit turns up unremarked in a Southern collection.