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Yankee Pork and Beans
Pick over carefully a quart of beans and let them soak over night; in the morning wash and drain in another water, put on to boil in cold water with half a teaspoon of soda; boil about thirty minutes (when done the skin of a bean will crack if taken out and blown upon), drain, and put in an earthen pot first a slice of pork and then the beans, with two or three table-spoons of molasses. When the beans are in the pot, put in the center half or threefourths of a pound of well-washed salt pork with the rind scored in slices or squares, and uppermost, season with pepper and salt if needed; cover all with hot water, and bake six hours or longer in a moderate oven, adding hot water as needed; they can not be baked too long. Keep covered so that they will not burn on the top, but remove cover an hour or two before serving, to brown the top and crisp the pork. This is the Yankee dish for Sunday breakfast. It is often baked the day before, allowed to remain in the oven all night, and browned in the morning. Serve in the dish in which they are cooked, and always have enough left to know the luxury of cold beans, or baked beans warmed over. If salt pork is too robust for the appetites to be served, season delicately with salt, pepper, and a little butter, and roast a fresh spare-rib to serve with them.
A long, slow bake with very few moving parts. The whole dish turns on keeping liquid over the beans for the entire time and only uncovering at the end.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of dry beans is about 1¾–2 lb, four cups, and swells to feed eight to ten. Small white beans — navy, Great Northern, or pea beans — hold their shape best over six hours.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon of baking soda in the parboil raises the pH and speeds the softening of skins, which mattered when beans were a year old and the water was hard. With fresh supermarket beans it is unnecessary, and too much soda turns them slippery and slightly soapy.
- The blow testLifting a bean on a spoon and blowing on it is a real test, not a flourish: if the skin curls back and splits, the beans have taken enough water to finish in the oven. Underdone at this stage and they will still be chalky after six hours in molasses, which slows softening.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven was generally reckoned at somewhere around 350F, but for a six-hour bake set it to 300F and let the pot barely murmur. The point is hours of gentle heat, not simmering.
- The potAn earthen bean pot — narrow-mouthed and glazed inside — was standard and limits evaporation. A heavy lidded casserole or small Dutch oven does the same job; avoid a wide shallow dish, which dries out and needs constant topping up.
- Salt porkSalt pork is cured pork belly or fatback, still sold near the bacon in many markets. It can be very salty; the recipe itself calls for it well-washed, so rinse it thoroughly, or blanch it a couple of minutes, and hold back added salt until the last hour.
- Water and the lidKeep the beans covered by liquid the whole time, adding boiling water — cold water checks the pot and toughens skins. Uncover for the last hour or two, as the recipe directs, so the top browns and the scored rind crisps.
- The overnight ovenLeaving the pot in the range all night worked because a wood or coal stove was cooling steadily toward morning. A thermostatic gas or electric oven holds its setting instead; bake the day before, cool, refrigerate, and reheat and brown in the morning.
- MolassesTwo or three tablespoons is a restrained hand — this is a savoury dish, not the heavily sweetened version sold as Boston baked beans. Use unsulphured molasses; blackstrap is more bitter than what the book had in mind.
Baked beans belong to the New England Sabbath: the pot went into the cooling brick oven on Saturday, and fed the household through Saturday supper and Sunday breakfast without any work being done on the day of rest. The dependence on molasses is a relic of the coastal trade with the West Indies, which is generally credited with making molasses a cheap sweetener in the northern states. It appears under the name Yankee Pork and Beans in The Dixie Cook Book, whose compilers were drawing on the same pool of American domestic recipes as the northern manuals. The recipe closes by offering a roast spare-rib for those who find salt pork "too robust."