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The Bean Hole and the Method of Cooking Beans

Beans cooked slowly in a pit with salt pork and coals.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

The Bean Hole and the Method of Cooking Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Parboil the beans

  1. Parboil the beans in an iron kettle on the stove for several hours.

Build the pit

  1. Build a fire in a hole in the ground using soft and hard wood, about 2 feet deep.

  2. Once the fire is burning well, cover it with stones and old iron.

Bake overnight and serve

  1. In a bean pot, layer the parboiled beans and salt pork alternately.

  2. Place the covered pot of beans over the hot coals.

  3. Cover the pot with hot ashes and earth, and let it cook overnight for 12 to 14 hours.

  4. In the morning, carefully remove the pot from the hole and serve the beans hot.

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 + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 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

Dried beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and creamy through long slow cooking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that seasons the beans as they cook slowly.

The step that matters

Parboil the beans. Beans must be cooked thoroughly before the long underground bake, because dried beans with tough skins and starches do not soften fully in the low, slow heat alone.

“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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