Oh, wonderful baked beans in all their gooey home-cooked goodness. You know what I’m talking about. Ever since I was born, passing by my grandmother’s house, she understood that I would eat baked beans whether I liked it or not, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Fortunately, we did, and after a while we returned. As I grew up and learned to cook, I became more and more happy to carry on the tradition. They changed my recipe a bit, but they were still the terrific bean bowls we always loved.
When I started to find ways to improve my grandmother’s already terrific recipe, I wondered where it all came from. Someone had to create a dish at one point. That’s when I decided it was time to explore.
Find out America created the idea of baked beans. The entire estate is made. After all, they had all the facilities there at their feet. The difference between ours now and those then was that they used bear fat and maple syrup in theirs. Indeed, they are baked in clay pots while we use Dutch ovens. Then the European settlers saw what the natives were doing and began to use pig fat and molasses in their recipes. Some say that variations of the recipe were brought from France to the New World, but whatever crazy things happened in our world, some of us ended up with the American beans we know and love today. They met traditionally. We’ve all heard of Boston Baked Beans (or we’ve been locked in the closet for a hundred years). After all, Boston, Massachusetts is the place where baked beans became popular. So the town is flooded with molasses. Back in the day molasses was a huge ingredient used in creating Rum and Boston was a huge manufacturer of exactly that. This is the reason why they used millet in everything they could think of, when it was available. . Once you know, much more that the dish is finished, you can enjoy its rich culture. I have prepared this article in the spirit of those Boston beans of which we have spoken. Molasses has a great flavor with that flavor of cooked bacon. It must be cooked completely.
Here is the recipe:
“Old-Fashioned Style Boston Baked Beans” *
Ingredients: A cup of molasses, 13 cups of water, 1 pound a class of dry beans sorted and rinsed, 1 tsp salt, a cup of chopped onion, a cup of brown sugar, and 1/3 cup of cooked crisp and crumbled bacon.
1) Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.
2) In an oven-proof Dutch oven, heat the beans and 10 cups of water to boiling. Keep boiling for 2 more minutes. Stir in all ingredients except 3 cups of water.
3) Cover and cook for 4 hours stirring occasionally.
4) Stir in 3 cups of water. We cook uncovered for about 2 hours longer, stirring occasionally until the beans are tender.
5) Enjoy all the delicious culture in one cold or hot bowl.
*The recipe below started with Annali Crocker. and then invented it from there.
Note: Content of this article was found on both http://gonewengland.about.com and http://vasatwiki.icrisat.org