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Baked Beans

A baked bean dish cooked with salt pork in a stone jar.

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 ↓

Baked Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Soak and parboil

  1. Soak the beans in 3 pints of water overnight.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and parboil them until the skins crack easily.

  3. Drain the beans in a colander.

Cook slowly in the jar

  1. Place the beans in a 2-quart stone jar with the scored salt pork in the center.

  2. Cover with hot water and cook slowly until 6 o'clock.

  3. Check regularly and add more water if needed.

  4. About an hour before serving, remove the cover to let the water evaporate.

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).

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 main body of the dish and thicken the liquid as their starch softens during slow cooking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that seeps into the beans during the long cook.

The step that matters

Keeping the beans covered with water during the slow cook. Beans that are exposed to air can dry out, scorch, and cook unevenly. Checking the water level and topping it up keeps the beans tender and evenly softened over the long cooking time.

“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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