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Pork and Boston Baked Beans
Plunge a pint large, dried white beans in a gallon cold water to soak for twelve hours. Drain on a sieve and place in an earthen baked-bean pot. Pour one and a half quarts cold water into a basin, add two gills molasses, one tablespoon salt and a heavy teaspoon white pepper. Mix well with a whisk for a minute. Pour this over the beans. Place over the beans a one-pound piece salt pork, tightly cover the pot and lay in a roasting tin, containing a gallon cold water. Set in the oven and let steam for six hours, carefully watching not to let the water dry up in the pan; if it should dry up add some more hot water. Remove, clean the pot all around with a towel and send to the table without uncovering.
A standard Boston bean pot recipe from the era when the pot went straight from oven to table, lid on. The measurements translate cleanly; the salt and the oven temperature are the two things worth thinking about before you start.
- The measurementsA pint of dried beans is about 2 cups, roughly a pound. Two gills of molasses is 1 cup — a gill is half a cup. The gallon of soaking water is simply generous; any amount that keeps the beans submerged will do.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because none could be. Baked beans want a slow oven, 275–300°F, held for the full six hours. Higher and the molasses scorches at the edges before the centres of the beans soften.
- The water bath is the pointThe bean pot sits in a roasting tin of water so the beans cook by gentle, even heat rather than direct oven heat. Check it every hour or so and top up with boiling water — cold water in a hot tin will drop the temperature and can crack an earthenware pot.
- SaltA pound of salt pork plus a tablespoon of salt is a great deal by current palates, and salt pork sold today is still very salty. Half a tablespoon is plenty; taste at the end and correct rather than the other way round.
- The salt porkAsk for a slab with a good fat-to-lean ratio. The recipe lays the piece on top of the beans; scoring the rind is common, and some cooks blanch it briefly first to draw off surface salt.
- Hard water and old beansBeans that refuse to soften after six hours are usually stale rather than badly cooked. Buy dried beans that have turned over recently, and note that the molasses added at the start -- as here -- is often said to slow softening, which may be part of why the time is so long.
- YieldA pint of dried beans with a pound of pork feeds six to eight as a side dish, four as a main. It reheats better than it bakes, and is at its best the next day.
Baked beans belong to New England more firmly than almost any other American dish, and this version — beans, molasses, salt pork, a covered earthenware pot, a very long slow bake — is the orthodox Boston form. The molasses is the historical fingerprint: Boston was a molasses port, distilling imported West Indian molasses into rum, and cheap molasses was the region's everyday sweetener long before granulated sugar was affordable. The dish is also often connected to the Puritan sabbath, the pot going into the cooling oven on Saturday and coming out for Sunday dinner with no work done on the day itself; that association is traditional rather than closely documented, but the six-hour bake makes the logic plain.