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Baked Beans
1 quart beans pound salt fat pork 1 teaspoon mustard cup molasses 1 teaspoon salt Pick over and wash beans; cover with cold water and soak overnight. In the morning, drain, cover with fresh water and cook slowly below boiling point until soft, then drain. Put-inch slices of salt pork in the bottom of an earthen bean pot or covered crock. Put beans in pot and bury the remaining pork (which should be gashed in several places) in the beans. Mix the salt, mustard and molasses in a cup; fill the cup with boiling water and pour the mixture over the beans. Add enough more boiling water to cover beans. Cover bean pot, put in oven, and bake in a slow oven 300°F. 5 to 8 hours. If baked a long time, they become dark and have a rich flavor.
A standard New England bean pot recipe, printed here with several fractions lost in transcription. The quantities below are the conventional ones for a quart of dry beans, but note where the original text is genuinely incomplete.
- The missing fractionsThe ingredient line reads "pound salt fat pork" and "cup molasses" — a fraction has dropped out of each in the original printing. Standard practice for a quart of dry beans is about 1/2 lb salt pork and 1/4 to 1/2 cup molasses. Likewise "Put-inch slices" was almost certainly 1/4-inch or 1/2-inch slices.
- A quart of dry beansThat is roughly 1 3/4 lb, or about 4 cups, of dried navy or pea beans. Soaked and baked it will feed eight to ten people generously.
- Below the boiling pointThis is the hinge of the recipe. Beans boiled hard before baking burst their skins and go to mush; held at a bare simmer around 180-190°F they soften while staying whole. Stop when the skin cracks and curls if you blow on a spoonful.
- Salt pork todayModern salt pork is often leaner and much saltier than the fat side pork intended here. Rinse it, and hold back on the added teaspoon of salt until you taste the liquid near the end. Thick-cut unsmoked bacon or fresh pork belly with extra salt is a fair substitute.
- The ovenThe original already gives the number: 300°F, which is what "slow oven" meant. Five hours is enough; eight gives the dark, almost caramelized result the note refers to as "rich flavor."
- Keeping them coveredCheck every hour or two and top up with boiling water so the beans stay just submerged. Water added cold arrests the cooking. For the last half hour, uncover the pot to let the top brown and the liquid reduce to a syrup.
- Molasses and cooking timeSweeteners and acid slow the softening of bean skins, which is why the beans are simmered nearly tender before the molasses goes in. Do not reverse the order. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter at this quantity.
- Pot substitutionAn earthenware bean pot or crock is ideal for its narrow neck and slow, even heat, but a heavy lidded Dutch oven works. A slow cooker on low will cook the beans through but will not produce the dark crust.
Baked beans in a covered earthen pot are traditionally associated with colonial New England Saturday cooking: the pot went into the cooling brick oven or the coals and sat overnight, so that a hot meal was ready without labor on the Sabbath — a much-repeated account that rests more on tradition than on documentation. The molasses is not decoration but economics — Boston was a molasses port, distilling West Indian cane syrup into rum, and molasses was for generations the cheapest sweetener in the region, which is where the name "Boston baked beans" is generally traced from. By the time this appeared in a company-issued household book like the Metropolitan Cook Book, canned baked beans were already widely sold. The concluding note that long baking makes them "dark and have a rich flavor" is the whole argument for doing it at home.