Skip to main content
Main

Pork and Beans

A dish of soaked beans cooked with salt pork, baked until the pork turns a fine brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pork and Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the dried beans overnight in soft water.

  2. In the morning, change the water for warmer water.

  3. After two hours, boil the beans in cold water until soft.

  4. Drain the beans well and place them in a deep dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Sink the parboiled salt pork in the middle of the beans, leaving only the top visible.

  2. Score the pork in long furrows to mark the slices before baking.

  3. Bake until the pork is a fine brown.

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 bulk of the dish and become tender and creamy when soaked and boiled.
Salt pork
Flavors the beans with fat and salt while its top browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Baking until the pork is a fine brown. The pork top needs enough oven time to brown without drying out the beans below. Browning comes from heat changing the surface sugars and proteins, so the cook must watch color rather than rely on time 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.

More pork and beans recipes

Baked 27Boston 10Boston baked 3Corned 3 See all 78 →

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes