Categories: Food & Wine

How to Make Old-Fashioned Style Boston Baked Beans

Oh, miraculous baked beans in all their gooey home-baked goodness. You know what I am talking about. Ever since I was born, going over to grandma’s house has meant I was going to eat baked beans whether or not I liked it, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Luckily, like it we did, and we kept coming back time after time. As I grew up and learned how to cook, I was more than happy to carry on the tradition. My recipe altered hers a little bit, but they were still that terrific bowl of beans we always loved.

As I started finding ways to improve grandma’s already terrific recipe I started wondering where it all came from. Someone had to have created the dish at one point. That’s when I decided it was time to research it.

Come to find out that it was the Native Americans that created the idea of baked beans. It makes a whole lot of sense. After all, they had all the resources right there at their feet. The difference between ours now and theirs then was that they used bear fat and maple syrup in theirs. Naturally they cooked in an earthenware pot while we use Dutch ovens. Then the European settlers saw what the natives were doing and they started using pork fat and molasses in their recipe. Some say that variations of the recipe were brought from France to the New World, but whatever happened in our crazy world, we some how ended up with the American beans we know and love today.

Actually there are some very interesting facts about how the colonials came across the traditional dish. We have all heard of Boston Baked Beans (or we have been locked in a closet for hundreds of years). After all, Boston, Massachusetts is the place where the baked beans became very popular. The fact is that the town was absolutely flooded in molasses. Back in the day molasses was a huge ingredient used in creating Rum and Boston was a huge manufacturer of exactly that. Because of this reason molasses was used in everything they could think of, since it was readily available.

It is amazing to realize you have been cooking something and enjoying it all your life and never knew where it came from. Once you do know, you can enjoy its rich culture all that much more for what the dish has been through. The recipe I have laid down for this article is in the spirit of those Boston Baked Beans we talked of. It has great molasses flavor along with that yummy taste of the bacon baked in to it. It’s definitely a must bake.

Here’s the recipe:

“Old-Fashioned Style Boston Baked Beans”*

Ingredients: ¼ cup molasses, 13 cups water, 1 pound dried navy beans sorted and rinsed, 1 tsp salt, ½ cup chopped onion, ½ cup packed brown sugar, and 1/3 cup crisply cooked and crumbled bacon.

1) Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

2) In an ovenproof Dutch oven, heat the beans and 10 cups of water to a boiling. Keep boiling for 2 more minutes. Stir in all ingredients except 3 cups of water.