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Canadian Baked Beans
Mrs. Higgins.
Boil the beans, until they begin to crack, with a pound or two of fat salt pork; put the beans in the baking-pan; score the pork across the top, and settle in the middle; add two tablespoons of sugar or molasses, and bake in a moderate oven two hours; they should be very moist when first put into the oven, or they will grow too dry in baking. Do not forget the sweetening if you want Yankee baked beans.
A bare-bones version of the New England bean pot, with no bean quantity given and a bake time that is short by modern standards. The single most important instruction is the one Mrs. Higgins repeats: the beans must go into the oven swimming in liquid, and be topped up as they drink it.
- Quantity, since none is givenTwo tablespoons of sweetening and one to two pounds of pork point to about a pound of dried beans (roughly 2 cups), which serves six to eight. Navy or small white beans are the traditional choice; yellow-eye beans were common in the same period.
- Soaking and the crack testSoak the beans overnight, then parboil until the skins split and curl back when you blow on a spoonful — that is what "begin to crack" means. It takes 20 to 40 minutes depending on the age of the beans, and the beans should still be firm at the centre.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally taken as somewhere around 350F, though a period oven's heat was neither steady nor measured. For beans that is on the high side; 300 to 325F for a longer stretch gives a better texture and less risk of scorching the top.
- Two hours is not enoughBeans parboiled only until the skins crack need three to five hours of covered baking to become creamy. Uncover for the last half hour to brown the pork and the surface.
- Salt porkFat salt pork is still sold, often as slab or streaky belly cure. Modern cures vary in saltiness; rinse the piece and taste the cooking liquid before adding any salt of your own. The recipe asks only that the pork be scored across the top and settled in the middle; bed it so the scored surface sits just proud of the beans, where it will crisp.
- LiquidCover the beans with the parboiling water or with fresh boiling water, and keep them submerged throughout. Add boiling water, never cold, when the level drops. This is the difference between baked beans and a dry, split-skinned pan of them.
- SweeteningTwo tablespoons of sugar or molasses for roughly a pound of beans is restrained; many later recipes use a quarter cup or more, sometimes with a spoonful of mustard. Molasses is acidic and calcium-rich, both of which slow softening, so if you like it sweeter, add half at the start and the rest in the last hour.
- VesselA deep covered pot with straight sides — a bean pot, Dutch oven or casserole — holds heat and moisture far better than the shallow "baking-pan" of the original.
Baked beans belong to the whole northeastern seaboard rather than to any one side of the border, and the recipe's own last line gives the game away: Mrs. Higgins calls them Canadian, then measures them against "Yankee baked beans," meaning the molasses-sweetened Boston version. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and is often said to be the first Canadian community fundraising cookbook, assembled in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, and its pages move freely between British, American and local practice. The dish itself descends from the long, slow, low-attention cooking that suited a wood-fired oven's falling heat, with the beans drawn out in the morning and the pork doing duty as fat, seasoning and the household's most reliable winter meat.