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Boston Baked Bean Sandwich
Press cold baked beans through a colander, add two stalks of celery chopped fine, a teaspoonful of horse-radish, and a little tomato catsup; mix and spread on buttered slices of Boston brown bread, cover with another slice, and garnish with a radish and a pickle.
A straightforward leftovers sandwich, and the only real decisions are texture and moisture. The mash wants to be thick enough to hold, not a paste that soaks the bread.
- Quantities are openThe original gives no bean measurement. About 1 1/2 cups of cold baked beans, pressed, fills two to three sandwiches with the celery, horseradish and catsup as written.
- Pressing through a colanderA colander with holes large enough to pass beans is really a coarse sieve; pressing this way will hold back much of the skin. A potato masher or a few pulses in a food processor gets you to the same place, but stop short of puree so the celery still reads as crunch.
- Cold beans, not warmUse beans straight from the refrigerator. Warm beans loosen, and the molasses-heavy sauce in a Boston-style bean will wet the bread through within minutes.
- HorseradishA teaspoonful most likely means prepared horseradish in vinegar, which was widely sold bottled by this period, though the root could equally have been grated fresh. Fresh grated root is considerably hotter; use about half as much.
- Boston brown breadThe steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and usually wheat flour, cooked in a mould or can and sweetened with molasses. It slices thin and crumbles if cut thick, so a sharp serrated knife and slices about 1/4 inch are best. Any dense dark bread substitutes without much loss.
- CatsupTomato catsups of the period were often thinner, sharper and more spiced than modern ketchup, though thick sweet bottled ketchup was also on sale by then. A dash of cider vinegar alongside the ketchup brings it closer, and keeps the filling from turning sweet.
- Assembly and holdingButter the bread right to the edges; the fat is the barrier between the bread and the filling. Wrapped, they are best eaten soon; the filling will damp the bread if they stand.
Sandwich books multiplied in the first two decades of the twentieth century, driven by the vogue for afternoon teas, card parties, picnics and the packed lunch, and by the spread of commercial bakery bread. Their Miscellaneous chapters are essentially a catalogue of what to do with cold leftovers, which is exactly what this is: Saturday night's baked beans and Sunday's brown bread, the classic New England pairing, reassembled into a Monday sandwich. Boston brown bread is a steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and molasses, often explained as a survival of the era before dependable home ovens, and it was sold alongside baked beans in cans as a matched set. The horseradish, catsup and chopped celery lift a plain mashed filling with something sharp, something sweet and something crisp.