Homemade baked beans with bacon and molasses, cooked for five hours in the oven. Baked beans from scratch? Soaked overnight and all? Instead of just opening a tin? Why not, if they can do it in Boston?
Baked beans with bacon are called b-b-beans in my house; not particularly inventively. Twenty years ago we wouldn’t dream of baking beans at home (apart from truly dedicated Bostonians); we would just open a tin of Heinz and pour them onto a toast.
Beans on toast is something I have never acquired a taste for and can’t really get my head around, not being a born and bred Englishman. My mum never heated up beans for my tea (not that her offer was super-choice better than that) and I never rummaged drunkenly in the cupboard, scraping mould off the bread to feed my student self after a night out. Different culture, different tins.
Risking blasphemy, I must admit I don’t like Heinz beans. Too sugary, too mushy, too ketchupy (between me and you, I don’t like Heinz tomato soup or Campbell cream of mushroom either – what’s wrong with me?). But I like beans and I appreciate their fibre-rich, filling qualities (though the wind-related side effects not so much). And so there come Boston beans, the classic cooked for hours and hours with a proper slab bacon home cut into chunks, molasses and mustard.
It is an awesome dish, side effects regardless – just don’t drink beer with your dinner of beans, that’s catastrophic. A truly wintry comfort food, it can easily be put on toast if you’re of that disposition. The kitchen smells adorable the whole afternoon while the beans are cooking; though admittedly it does smell also on the next days and not so adorable any more. It’s completely worth the effort – and it gives you a sense of achievement that opening a thousand Heinz tins wouldn’t match up to.