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Baked Beans

A simple bean dish cooked with salt pork and water over several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans overnight in cold water.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and add fresh water (twice the amount of beans).

  3. Add the piece of salt pork and boil for 15 minutes.

Bake

  1. Set the kettle into a larger one containing boiling water and pack in the cooker for 3 hours.

  2. Remove, boil again, and put back in the cooker for another 3 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 + 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

Dried beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and creamy during soaking and long cooking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury flavour that slowly infuses into the beans as they cook.

The step that matters

Setting the kettle in a larger kettle of boiling water. This water bath gives gentle, even heat around the beans. Gentle heat lets the beans soften through without bursting or scorching against the hot metal 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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