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Boston Baked Beans

A baked bean dish with salt pork, mustard, molasses, and water, simmered and baked for eight hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Boston Baked Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the pea beans in cold water overnight.

  2. Drain and simmer the beans in fresh cold water until soft enough to pierce with a pin, but do not boil them long enough to break.

  3. If desired, boil a small onion with the beans.

  4. Drain the beans and place them in a bean pot.

Prepare the pork and sauce

  1. Pour boiling water over the salt pork and scrape the rind until white.

  2. Bury the pork in the beans, leaving only the rind exposed.

  3. Mix the dry mustard, salt, and molasses in a cup, then fill with hot water and stir until well mixed.

  4. Pour the mixture over the beans and pork, adding enough water to cover the beans.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for eight hours, adding water to keep the beans covered until the last hour, when raise the pork to the surface to crisp.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + porktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

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

  5. 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

Pea beans
Form the bulk of the dish, becoming tender and creamy during the long, slow bake.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor to the beans, and its crisped rind browns at the surface.
Molasses
Provides sweetness and deep color, and helps form the dark, rich sauce.
Dry mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent note that balances the sweetness of the molasses.

The step that matters

Simmer the beans without boiling them hard. Beans cooked at a hard boil can split and break apart. A gentle simmer softens them while keeping their shape for the long bake.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pork, mustard, molasses):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, mustard, 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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