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Baked Beans

A bean dish cooked with bacon, mustard, molasses, tomato sauce, and chili sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans for 2 to 3 hours until the skins are loose.

  2. Rub the beans between your palms to remove the skins.

  3. Rinse the beans with cold water and place them in a bean pot.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add the chopped onion, tomato sauce, and chili sauce to the pot.

  2. Bury the bacon in the beans.

  3. Mix boiling water with mustard, salt, and molasses to cover the beans.

  4. Keep the beans covered until the last hour of cooking.

  5. In the last hour, lift the bacon to the top and brown it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Beans + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the sauce as they cook.
Molasses
Adds dark sweetness and a deep, rich colour to the sauce.
Bacon
Adds savoury fat and flavour, and browns on top during the final hour.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and body to the sauce around the beans.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aroma as it cooks into the sauce.

The step that matters

Keep the beans covered until the last hour of cooking. Covering holds in moisture so the beans cook through slowly without drying out, while the uncovered final hour lets the bacon brown.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, mustard, molasses, tomato, sauce):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, mustard, molasses, tomato, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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