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Baked Beans

A stew of soaked beans, salt pork, onions, carrots, peppers, and tomatoes baked with butter, flour, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,443 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Baked Beans

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans in cold water for 4 hours, then drain.

  2. Add fresh cold water, 2 whole onions, and the cooked pork until tender.

  3. Remove the onions and pork, then drain the beans.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the chopped onion and carrots, cloves, bay leaf, and whole peppers, and cook for 10 minutes.

  2. Add flour and thin with the tomatoes, cooking for 5 more minutes.

  3. Season with salt and sugar, strain, and add the beans to the sauce.

Bake

  1. Transfer to a pudding dish or pan, lay the pork in the center, and bake for 1 hour.

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 + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  5. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Beans
Form the bulk of the dish and absorb the sauce as they bake.
Salt pork
Adds savory fat and flavor that seasons the beans and sauce.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity and body that thin and flavor the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the beans.
Onions
Build savory flavor in the sauce as they soften.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking the beans until tender before baking. Dried beans must be fully softened before baking, because the acidic tomato sauce and the sugar slow further softening in the oven. Beans that are undercooked at this stage stay firm even after the long bake.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pork, onion, butter, carrot, pepper, flour):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, onion, butter, carrot, pepper, flour. 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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