Home › Sandwiches › Bean Sandwich
Bean Sandwich
Bake beans mashed to a paste; add mustard and finely chopped celery. Serve on thin slices of brown bread.
A three-line filling that assumes you already have a pot of baked beans in the house, which most households of the period did. The whole thing hinges on getting the beans dry enough to hold together on soft bread.
- "Bake beans" means baked beansProbably the household's leftover pot of baked beans, which in New England would have been the pork-and-molasses kind. A cup of canned baked beans, drained hard, is the closest quick equivalent.
- Drain before mashingBaked beans carry a lot of sauce, and a wet paste will soak straight through thin bread. Drain in a sieve, mash with a fork or potato masher, and stop while the mixture still holds a shape on the spoon.
- The mustardThis could be either prepared mustard or dry mustard powder, both common in period kitchens; it is added by taste rather than measure. A teaspoon per cup of beans is a reasonable starting point; the paste is bland and takes more than you expect.
- CeleryChop it very fine, almost minced, so it distributes rather than shears the sandwich apart when bitten. The celery is doing the work of texture here, so do not skimp.
- Brown breadThis may mean steamed Boston brown bread, the dark rye, cornmeal and whole-wheat loaf steamed in a can and sliced in rounds, or simply a plain whole-wheat or graham loaf. A dense whole wheat or pumpernickel stands in well; ordinary sandwich bread is too soft.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities; a cup of beans would fill roughly four small sandwiches. Assemble close to serving; these do not keep well overnight.
Sandwich chapters expanded in American cookbooks, driven by the fashion for afternoon tea, picnics and the packed lunch pail, and they became a standard place to park leftovers in respectable form. Baked beans were a weekly fixture in New England kitchens, cooked in quantity in a crock and eaten down over several days, so a filling that made use of them needed no justification. Pairing them with brown bread is not a novelty either: beans and steamed brown bread were the conventional Saturday supper across New England, and this recipe simply compresses that pairing into something portable. The mustard and celery are often described as the era's standard correctives for a soft, sweet, one-note filling.