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Home Baked Beans and Boston Brown Bread

A simple baked bean dish sweetened with Karo corn syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and beans match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,211 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Home Baked Beans and Boston Brown Bread

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pour 1 tablespoon of Karo corn syrup over every ½ pint of cooked beans after cooking and before baking.

  2. Bake the beans until they are heated through and have a rich brown color.

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. Corn + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,211 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,678 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Syrup + beanstop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn syrup
Adds sweetness and helps the beans take on a rich brown color in the oven.
Cooked beans
Form the body of the dish and absorb the syrup as they bake.

The step that matters

Bake until heated through and rich brown. Sugars in the corn syrup caramelize and darken as the beans heat, so the color deepens quickly. Checking the beans during baking helps you stop before they scorch while still heating through evenly.

“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.

More baked beans recipes

Boston 154with Pork 8Canadian 8in Earthen Pots 3Chicago 3New England 3 See all 214 →

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