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Boston Baked Beans

A baked bean dish with white beans, salt pork, and sugar, simmered and baked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boston 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. Soak the beans in cold water in the morning.

  2. Let them stand on the back of the stove until after dinner, occasionally pouring off hot water and adding cold water.

  3. Wash the salt pork and cut the rind two or three times across.

Bake

  1. Add the pork to the beans along with the sugar.

  2. Parboil the mixture for a short time.

  3. Place in the oven and bake at 300°F (150°C) for 3 to 4 hours, ensuring there is enough water to keep them moist.

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).

  2. Beans + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Pork + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,579 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Small white beans
Form the bulk of the dish and become tender and creamy during the long soak and bake.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that spreads through the beans as they cook.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the salt pork and deepens browning during baking.

The step that matters

Keeping enough water in the beans during baking. Beans that dry out during a long bake can scorch and stay firm inside. Keeping enough liquid around them lets the starches fully gelatinize and the skins soften evenly.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, sugar):

  1. Sesamefits about as well
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, sugar. 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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