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Baked Beans Without Pork

A simple baked bean dish cooked without pork, using soaked beans, salt, butter, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Baked Beans Without Pork

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the beans

  1. Parboil the soaked beans in the morning, changing the water several times.

  2. Place the beans in an earthen crock.

Bake

  1. Add salt, butter, and enough water to cover the beans.

  2. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven all day.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the bulk of the dish and, once slowly baked, turn tender and creamy in texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, contributing a rounder, smoother mouthfeel to the beans.

The step that matters

Parboil the soaked beans and change the water several times. Soaking and parboiling soften the beans and help remove compounds that cause gas and bitterness. Repeated water changes carry these away, so skipping them can leave the beans tough or harsh-tasting.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter):

  1. Pecansfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Filbertfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter. 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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