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Baked Beans

A dish of beans cooked with molasses, salt, ginger, red pepper, and pork or ham, baked for 24 hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,800 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans overnight.

  2. Boil the beans for several hours, changing the water three times.

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

Bake

  1. Add the pork or ham, molasses, salt, ginger, and red pepper.

  2. Cover with water and bake for 24 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. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

  2. Beans + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together609 recipes

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

  3. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  4. Beans + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

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

  5. Molasses + gingertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried beans
Provide the main body and starchy texture that the long cooking softens into a thick, tender base.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and a deep, slightly bitter flavor during the long bake.
Pork or ham
Adds savory flavor and fat that slowly melts into the beans during baking.

The step that matters

Boil the beans for several hours. Dried beans must be thoroughly cooked before baking. Long boiling softens their starches and breaks down natural toxins such as lectins, which are not reliably destroyed by the gentler heat of the oven alone.

Swap the beans

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, ginger, pepper, pork. 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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