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July 31
Menu: Baked Beans; Finger Rolls; Beet and Potato Salad; Lemon Jelly, Whipped Cream; Cafe Parfait Baked Beans-Wash 2 quarts of small white beans, put them in a saucepan, cover with cold water; as soon as they come to a boil, drain; put them in a fireproof baking dish, add 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1 chopped onion, salt and pepper to taste and 1/4 teaspoon mustard, fill dish with boiling water, cover tight, and bake from 5 to 6 hours; add more water as required to keep from getting dry. They can be warmed over as needed.
A plain, savory pot of beans with no molasses, no sugar and no pork — the Crisco book's point being that the fat does the work salt pork usually does. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureUnstated, but a five- to six-hour bean pot means a slow oven, 275-300F. Higher than that and the surface dries and the skins split before the interiors soften.
- Quantity is largeTwo quarts of dry beans is roughly 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 lb, which will yield close to a gallon cooked and serve sixteen to twenty. Halve or quarter it unless you are cooking for a crowd; the line about warming them over as needed suggests it was meant to be eaten from over several days.
- No overnight soakThe recipe substitutes a bring-to-a-boil-and-drain for soaking. That works, but modern dry beans vary in age and old beans can stay stubborn for hours. An overnight soak, or a 10-minute boil followed by an hour's rest, shortens the bake and gives more even results.
- "Small white beans"Navy or pea beans. Great Northerns are acceptable but larger and softer-skinned.
- Salt lateAcid slows the softening of bean skins, and hard water slows it too (salt's effect is disputed; salted water may in fact help). If your beans are old or your water is hard, hold back most of the salt until the last hour and season to taste at the end.
- The fatFour tablespoons of Crisco for this quantity of beans is a modest amount, and any neutral solid or liquid fat does the same job. Bacon fat or salt pork will give the more familiar baked-bean flavour, but it undoes the whole reason this version exists.
- Keep them covered and wetThe hinge of the dish. Beans left uncovered or allowed to drop below the waterline go leathery on top and never recover. Check every hour and top up with boiling — not cold — water.
- Seasoning is bareOnion, salt, pepper and a quarter teaspoon of mustard for a gallon of beans is very restrained by later standards. A few tablespoons of molasses or brown sugar and a bay leaf will not offend the method if you want the sweeter New England profile.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was a cookbook built to make a case: that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911, could stand in for butter, lard and salt pork across the whole of American cooking. Baked beans were a pointed choice. The dish is traditionally built on a piece of fat salt pork buried in the pot, and a pork-free version had obvious appeal to kosher households — Crisco was advertised in the Jewish press early on, though the concerted campaign aimed at kosher cooks, including the Yiddish-English Crisco cookbook, came considerably later — as well as to anyone keeping a meatless day. The recipe belongs to the day-by-day menu scheme that circulated under the title "A Calendar of Dinners," carrying the date August 1 as a perpetual calendar entry, which is why it arrives with no explanation and no oven setting: it was one line in a plan for a summer day, when a pot that bakes unattended all day and reheats for the rest of the week earns its place.