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Baked Beans

A dish of beans simmered with molasses, mustard, olive oil, and salt, baked slowly in an oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Beans

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. Wash the desired quantity of beans and soak overnight in enough water to cover them.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and boil them in fresh water for 15 minutes.

  3. Pour off the water.

Bake

  1. Place the beans in an earthen crock.

  2. Add molasses, mustard, olive oil, salt, and enough water to cover.

  3. Cover the crock with a lid.

  4. Cook slowly in the oven at 300°F (150°C) all day.

  5. Add water occasionally until one hour before serving.

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

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

  2. Beans + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Molasses + mustardtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together468 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Beans + molassestop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together491 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

Beans
Provide the starchy, protein-rich body of the dish that softens during long, slow cooking.
Molasses
Adds dark sweetness and color, and its sugars brown slowly during the long bake.
Olive oil
Adds fat that gives the sauce a richer mouthfeel and carries flavor.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent note that balances the sweetness of the molasses.

The step that matters

Add water occasionally until one hour before serving. Beans absorb liquid as they cook and can dry out or scorch during the long bake. Topping up the water keeps them moist and lets the beans soften fully without the sauce burning onto the crock.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Welsh onionfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, molasses, olive. 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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