Nothing sounds easier to prepare--or more iconic--than Boston Baked Beans. Yet, sometimes it's the easiest tasks in life that prove most elusive. Either you lower your cooking guard and allow distractions to steal your attention--or the final product is so widely appreciated, that everyone knows exactly how it should taste--or more commonly, some combination of the two.
In New World terms, Boston Baked Beans have certainly been around forever. In the colonies, Boston formed the heart of the worldwide rum trade, and imported millions of gallons of molasses to support the distillation. It was only inevitable that some of that molasses would spread into other foods, dried beans being the first and most notable.
Beans are tiny sponges for flavor of any kind, and before the first shots at Bunker Hill, Bostonians had come up with a slow-baked white Navy (or pea) bean with plenty of sweet molasses, a whole onion, dried yellow mustard, and salt pork. That recipe survives intact to this day.
But slow-cooking can be a challenge for the purist in these modern, impatient times. The critical component is the liquid (usually water, but we've mixed in various broths and rums as well). Too little, and you condemn the beans to a parched, inedible death; too much, and you literally drown the flavor out of them. You don't need to hover over the oven door, but in the six hours they sit there, you need to check them every hour or so.
This is one of the few dishes where we consult a recipe, if only for the quantity of molasses--roughly 1/3 cup per pound of beans. We've tried adding and subtracting ingredients with our usual recklessness, but even though they might have wowed an occasional audience, they just weren't Boston Baked Beans.
Fanny Farmer featured the dish in her original 1912 Boston Cooking School cookbook. Our favorite recipe dates via Durgin Park, the legendary Bostonian eatery, at least as far back as the revolutionary New England cookbook, The Frugal Housewife of 1883.
Fortunately, we're still lucky enough to have the website developed years ago by Mary E. Gage and called New England Recipes. Her authentic bean recipe can be found here, along with her accompanying Boston Brown Bread here. She throws in a little history and pedigree along the way.
And we are nothing if not purists when it comes to New England cooking. Our Boston Baked Beans will never see the inside of any but the most authentic Boston Bean Pot. Our Boston Brown Bread will never be steamed in any vessel other than a leftover 12-ounce metal coffee can (harder to find than it sounds these days). Yes, we know you can put on a Shakespearean play with hip, modern voices, but why would you want to?
The only beans we'll ever buy? Camelia, no question--from Amazon or direct from the company's very hip Louisiana website.