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Pork and Beans, New York Style
Soak a pint of large white beans in plenty of water over night, or six hours at least. Drain, place in a saucepan with two quarts water one and a half pounds salt pork, one carrot cut in quarters, one onion with two cloves stuck in it. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches parsley, one bay leaf and a spring thyme, and add to pan with half a teaspoon white pepper, cover and let boil two and a half hours, remove, drain on a sieve, remove carrots, onions and bunch of herbs. Replace the beans in same pan, add one ounce good butter with a gill molasses, mix well, then place in a baking dish. Cut pork in thin slices and arrange them over the beans, one overlapping another, sprinkle two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs over, place in oven twenty-five minutes, remove and serve.
A French-trained treatment of a New England staple: the beans are simmered with a bouquet garni and clove-stuck onion before they ever see the oven. The result is closer to a cassoulet than to a bean pot.
- The hinge: no salt until the endA pint of dried beans plus a pound and a half of salt pork carries all the salt the dish needs. Taste after the simmer and before the molasses goes in, and only then decide whether anything more is wanted.
- A gill of molassesA gill is half a cup, which is a great deal of molasses for a pint of beans. Start with a quarter cup, mix, taste, and add more if you want the darker, sweeter New York style the title promises.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature. Twenty-five minutes is a browning period rather than a bake, so 400F suits it; the beans are already fully cooked when they go in.
- Salt pork todaySalt pork varies a good deal from butcher to butcher, and some of what is sold now is fatter and more heavily cured than this recipe seems to assume. Slab bacon or a piece of unsmoked pork belly works better if you want slices firm enough to shingle over the top, and blanching the pork five minutes first tames the salt.
- Simmer, don't boil"Let boil two and a half hours" will burst the skins and cloud the pot. Hold it at a bare tremble and check at 90 minutes; large white beans such as cannellini or Great Northern are usually tender well before the stated time.
- Save the cooking liquidThe recipe drains the beans on a sieve and discards the liquor. Keep a cup of it, because the beans will look dry after the butter and molasses are stirred through, and a splash restores them.
- LeeksTwo leeks tied into the bouquet; the white parts, split lengthwise and washed, are the practical choice. They are aromatics here and get pulled out with the herbs, not eaten.
- YieldA pint of dried beans gives roughly six servings as a side dish, four as a supper with bread.
Its interest lies in the collision it records: an unmistakably American dish of beans, salt pork and molasses built by a cook working in the French professional idiom, complete with bouquet garni, onion pique and a crumb gratin. Cooks in New York's grand restaurants of the period often put local dishes through that grammar, which is how "pork and beans" acquires leeks, thyme and a bay leaf and ends up under browned breadcrumbs. The molasses is the honest American note; baked beans sweetened with molasses rather than sugar are generally traced to colonial New England, where West Indian molasses arrived cheaply by sea long before refined sugar was ordinary. Labelling the version "New York Style" chiefly distinguishes it from the Boston bean pot, where the beans bake for hours in their sweetened liquid instead of being simmered separately and finished briefly in the oven.