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Baked Beans

A baked bean dish with soaked beans, onion, molasses, bacon, and salt, cooked 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 onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 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

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a baking dish, combine the soaked beans, chopped onion, molasses, diced bacon, and salt.

  3. Cover the beans with cold water.

Bake

  1. Bake for three hours.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Onion + molassestop 36% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together524 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Soup beans
Form the bulk of the dish and turn tender and creamy during the long, slow bake.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and a deep brown color to the sauce as it cooks.
Bacon
Renders fat and smoky, savory flavor into the beans and the surrounding liquid.
Onion
Contributes savory aromatic depth that mellows and sweetens during baking.

The step that matters

Bake low and slow for three hours. Gentle, steady oven heat lets the bean starches and skins soften evenly without bursting or drying out. Higher heat tends to toughen the outside before the centers become tender.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, molasses. 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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