As a kid growing up in a Mayflower family in southern Maine (1950’s) baked beans were a Sunday staple. On a cold winter day my father would stoke a wood cook stove in the basement. After soaking beans overnight my mother put them in a ceramic pot, adding pepper, some dry mustard, water to cover, a chunk of salt pork, and a hug dollop of molasses. It would go in the cook stove oven by mid-morning. She also started bread. Then late in the afternoon the risen bread would go into the oven and around 4 or 5 we would have baked beans and home-made baked bread for supper.
I grew up in Central Maine(Somerset) and still remember Bean Pole Bean Suppers at the local church, they’d cook the beans in coals in a bean pot in a hole in the ground , from local belief that the baker wouldn’t fire the oven and some homes would observe Sundays as a Sabbath and not work or run home ovens. They were a big community event to go to a Bean Pole Supper even when I was growing up there in the 90’s. I still make home made Beans at home with double the amount of Salt Pork (so every bite has pork bits) and a whole large onion for flavor, molasses , pepper, dry mustard, of course, and home made Brown Bread.
Right around the mid-18th century. Boston was an integral part of the Triangular Trade (manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, raw materials like molasses to Great Britain), and excess molasses was simply incorporated into the local diet.
My family has Scandinavian roots, and brown baked beans have been a big part of their diets for hundreds of years. It all keeps on the shelf for a protein any time of the year.
Molasses remained a pretty big part of Boston until the early 20th century - Prohibition resulted in decreased demand for molasses and cane sugar eventually replaced molasses as a choice sweetener. Although people still like Boston baked beans and even canned brown bread exists (although no where as near as popular as it was in the early to mid 20th century)
@@ceciliajones7816 I used to eat them as a child but don't care for them so much as an adult. But a friend and I were talking a while back about things nostalgic, and she started talking about French burnt peanuts. That night, we went on a mission, driving around town to find a place that had them. Since then, when she is visiting her mom several months out of the year in California I will send her some😅
I remember going to family reunions in Maine(once part of Massachusetts commonwealth).We had about 8 to 10 separate baked bean dishes brought by family members( like it was an olde tyme bean hole suppah).😋
I’m a third generation New Mexico native of primarily Irish descent. Our traditional foods came by way of Appalachia, into Texas and New Mexico. We put garlic and chile on EVERYTHING! The bean recipes from the east are accentuated by the chiles, onions, garlic and corn from below the Southern border. Mexican influences are absolutely delicious and fun to blend with the heritage of my family.
When I learned that nursery rhyme as a kid, having been taught the importance of keeping food cold, I used to assume the people who liked the nine-day-old pease porridge would be *sitting* on "the pot," nine days old
As a boy growing up in Maryland (I am 79 years old) we did not eat nor make baked beans, but your recipe about Indian pudding makes me think of a dish Mama would make from time -to-time: spoon bread, which she would bake in a Pyrex casserole dish. I can see similarities to Indian pudding. We would spoon it out on our plates, add some butter, and enjoy it. We loved it. Another dish was split-pea soup, to which she would add a ham-hock and some onions. I still love it, and can see a kinship to Peas pudding. We never made peas pudding. On the other hand, my New Hampshire born wife, grew up on baked beans, but she has never tried to bake them, instead learning (very well) to make a big pot of various beans (brown, white, October beans), and black-eyed peas. She will doctor them up a bit, adding hot peppers, onions, of course the mandatory piece of pork (usually) and even some tomatoes. It's all good!
I grew up in Mass. I cannot emphasize how much I have *hated* Boston Baked Beans my whole life, to the point of disliking beans in food in general. I learned a LOT of really interesting history watching this video though! Thanks!
"Father and I went down to camp, along with Captain Gooding, and there we saw the boys and men all eating hasty pudding! Yankee Doodle, keep it up, Yankee Doodle Dandy. Mind the music and the step and with the girls be handy!"
There are also very old meatless versions of baked beans, although my grandma, whose farming family usually included some bacon in their crockery bean pot, seldom made them veggie style. It's true - it's a VERY old type of food, as both Jon and Ryan say. And my grandma would bake her beans for at least 8 hours! It made the entire house smell fantastic. One antique recipe that I used to have required slow, overnight baking!
It's not really necessary to presoak beans. Any toxins present are in a negligible amount. Soaking and rinsing also reduces flavor, and the gaseous effects from eating beans are not from the beans, but the fats that bean dishes tend to be overloaded with. Salting your beans while cooking does not make them tough, but acidic environments do. So tomato based recipes' beans' skins generally end up tougher and they take longer to cook. This is where (bases) baking soda helps beans cook faster. These days beans are astoundingly well sorted. You rarely find rocks, mud or sticks anymore, and they aren't nearly as dusty as they once were, but they should be inspected and rinsed first before using.
Don’t come to the south, you’ll fjnd all kinds of things in the beans before cooking. And if you buy farm fresh, it’s more likely, and dry from the store shelf is not much better. Beans cause gas because they contain a type of sugar, called oligosaccharide, that the body cannot break down. : google
Great video! Just as a point of historical correction -- the English arriving in 1620 that settled in Patuxet (renamed Plimoth) were Separatists, not Puritans. The Puritans came first in 1630.
Part of what makes Boston/New England unique is the near complete lack of German influence of the kind that 'created' the midwest. Anything east of Utica NY feels sort of 'New England-y', but the Midwest begins in Syracuse. By the time you're in Rochester, it feels like Illinois.
I grew up in syracuse and we ate Boston style baked beans regularly. So I'll have to disagree with you on the Midwest bit. Although my grandmother's family all hailed from the Midwest (mostly Illinois) my father didn't. He would have definitely been considered a New Englander
Also explains why Pennsylvania feels so Midwestern outside of Philly and the Lehigh Valley, despite the very non-Midwestern geography...Pennsylvanian white population was already about 1/3 German in 1800.
@@austinbell4685 The 1790 census for the Appalachians states just 8 German families they came more towards the middle of the 19th century but even today there's only 1 of what you'd consider to be a typical German surname in the top 20 for Pennsylvanian, it can appear to be more because the English settlers thought themselves to be American and don't add another country to their origin i.e. Irish American, Afro American.
As a New Englander, Boston baked beans were on the menu on Saturday night with hot dogs. Great video, Ryan really inspires with his presentation and overall personality.
It's common in my part of England ( East Anglia) to eat peas pudding and saveloys . Saveloys have been known since the early 18th century, a highly seasoned red skinned sausage made from pork offal ( brain , lights , etc) but nowadays any meat from pork to chicken or a mix .
@@benjaminscribner7737 Quite delicious. We use chick peas ( known as Ramsciches in the old journals) for the pudding , not sure whether saveloys are available in the US . They are ether boiled separately, steamed over the pudding while cooking or fried .
You should do one on Philadelphia. That was the second largest city in the British Empire, smaller only to London itself. A large part of why the Revolution occurred was because, as far as the Americans were concerned, England had become the tail wagging the dog.
I'm currently reading a 1929 book "The Story of Mana-hattin" in which they (there is no listed author, or even an editor, no attribution whatsoever!) try very hard to insist that in the 17th and 18th centuries, New York City is the center of commerce and politics and revolutionary activity :-) They do occasionally acknowledge that things are happening elsewhere, like Boston or Philadelphia, but only rarely, this book is hyper-focused on NYC. There are a couple of errors in scholarship, for example, that Staten Island went to New York because Christopher Billopp sailed a ship around it in under 24 hours, which is now largely dismissed as apocryphal, and the issue of slavery, at least for as far as I've gotten so far (to the end of the Stamp Act) is hardly mentioned at all, and not until after the British had taken over the colony even though the Dutch had used slave labor, that was just completely ignored. But recognizing these occasional concerns, the book is on the whole pretty interesting.
In New England at most breakfast places that are older, baked beans are offered as a side dish. We aren't that far from the food ways of the colonists. I add pie as well.
Informative documentary, as ever, thank you. Here in Blighty, mushy peas and baked beans are readily available at all good fish n' chip shops. Not forgetting salt and vinegar, of course.
I had a corn dish similar to this at Middleton place in South Carolina. They had a great lunch, bbq shredded pork over rice, beans, and the corn “pudding.”
Wow! A great episode trying food ways, commerce, and economics in Boston to pre and post revolutionary North America. Once again, Townsends cast and crew have delivered, informed, and inspired with a great video.
That Indian pudding reminds me a lot of the southern spoon bread I used to get at a (sadly) long closed cafeteria. (Ballentine's in Raleigh's Cameron Village).
I love that you are eating and enjoying without making us listen to the chewing sounds. For some of us that is triggering to hear so Thank You. I've made baked beans for my family before. It was a time when I was feeding a family of six on 20$ a week. We were lucky in that milk, cheese and beans were some of the staples that we had access to. Still potatos, cheap cuts of meat and strict serving portions were necessary to see us through. Baked beans were perfect.
When my mom was in the navy the mess hall would bake beans in the oven all night long low and slow and serve them for breakfast. Mom spent the rest of her life trying desperately to duplicate that recipe, but she never managed it. Grandma very nearly got it when she had the old coal stove. The trick was the fire started out hot, but slowly and gradually cooled down overnight resulting in a unique taste and texture. Salt pork, molasses, and onions were involved she thought, but the proportions were hard to get and, of course, that variation in temperature wasn't/isn't possible with a gas or electric oven.
I grew up 12 miles from Boston. I remember in 1949 that my dad would bring a pot of beans to our local bakery, which I remember was in the local A&P store, on Saturday morning after 8 AM. They would use the still hot ovens that they had baked bread in to cook the beans. Dad would go back to get them at 4 PM. The beans would be hot and bubbly and showed signs of boiling over during the process. They had two metal tags, one would be attached to the bean pot and the other was given to my dad so he could pick up the right pot. The most important ingredient in Boston baked beans was molasses. Salt pork of course and some tomato paste.
My grandmother used to bake beans that included ketchup, mustard, molasses, the pork was already in the beans. The molasses is what makes the beans extra sweet.
My dad was from Boston. We had baked beans and boston brown bread ( which is a raisin Molasses bread) on Friday's for a meatless meal. It was delicious. If we didn't have brown bread we had corn bread .
Many modern Americans are also unaware that modern Boston is about 150 years old. Colonial Boston was not filled with Catholics from Ireland and Italy haha!
Surprising to many is that you can make good baked beans using many different types of beans. Back in the 1950s and 1960s when growing up beans were often on the menu because people were still trying to recover from the depression and WW2 rationing and sending goods to war torn areas to help recovery (some items were still rationed until 1954). Beans could be grown easily in back yard gardens. Foods grown in the back yard were not rationed.
"Mean" is a weird word. Originally it meant stingy. However, a person of means is someone who has money. A meaning can also be a definition of a word. And then there's Mean Girls... I mean, that's a lot of meanings
I know that Boston is a very English based group of people, but the way you are doing the beans, it's almost identical to a French cassoulet. Not knowing the history of the cassoulet- who influenced who for a dish like this?
@@ladyprudence6 No, but the show is about the 18th century, and the reference of the people who came to form Boston were SE England. So who was the one who introduced the change from boiled to baked in historic Boston? French, Spanish, or someone else?
My family crosses over the Maine/New Brunswick border and baked beans and corn meal based "Johnny cake" was always a staple. Loads of molasses in both!
I grow my own dry beans… rockwells, orca, Abenaki,,,..I always soake them overnight and rinse well. Then I pressure can them so I have them whenever I need them. I can turn them into baked beans, creamy Italian Parmesan beans etc…..
The Boston area, as many know, has a number of big colleges and universities. Harvard, Northeastern, Boston University and Boston College annually play a hockey tournament known as The Beanpot. The tournament trophy is of course a beanpot.
Ah yes Boston was settled by Puritans. That's why they say 'wicked' so much it's funny how they're called baked beans, but they're stewed.. granted, stewed in an 'oven' that you could bake bread in, but they fill it up as a pot.
I have made the corn pudding with my home cooked corn ( Montana Morado which is purple all the way through). Before grinding I parch it then the pudding is really special.
Hasty pudding is a great Thanksgiving side dish or dessert. Depends upon what your family (or you) prefer. I think left overs were sliced and fried for breakfast or lunch the next day. Pudding gets fairly solid after it cools.
It's really simple and I know my history, because I'm from here. Get the beans. Soak the beans. If you're rich soak them in stock. If you're poor, water. Crack pork bones for marrow. Add to the bean pot (NOT ceramic, cast iron unless you're going to do a wet clay/dirt bake... but every bean is gonna taste as funky as the mud you're working with). You can't afford cane unless you're really rich, nor molasses... but you can either tap trees yourself or barter with a neighbor for maple syrup. And if you can't afford salt, you barter with the local fishwife because she will ALWAYS have a stash.
Maine and Saturday night baked beans 🫘..... never liked them much. However bread in a can.... Boston brown bread!!!! Bean hole beans are the best. Maine logging camp!
I’m from Texas, and beans are totally different here. They’re usually pinto beans. We don’t typically soak them at all (at least not anyone I know of), just sort them to check for bad ones and small rocks, then simmer them on the stovetop for around 4 hours or more, making sure to keep the water level above the beans. Different people like to season them their own way, so that’s extremely variable. My family likes salt pork and cilantro.
Wonderful water supply ???? Please do some more research. Boston has ONE spring. That was their supply of fresh water. This was important when the British blockaded the city in Revolutionary times.
My family had four recipes for baked beans. The basic Boston style with molasses, another using maple syrup, another using honey and the last one savory with no sweetener a lot of salt pork and doused with a small jigger of rum. My father said all four versions were used in our family back to around 1840, which was in the oldest diary of one of my many time grandmothers. It had no instructions beyond which combination was used for Sunday supper that week. Im too 20th century Yankee. I want molasses and brown sugar, bay leaf, salt pork, a dash of ketchup and pepper in the pot along with steamed bread and hot dogs as side dishes. Working class comfort food. I'm sorry to say that when my older brother died his wife trashed all the family historical documents of letters from as far back as 1750 and all the diaries and photographs from the civil war forward. She was indifferent to heritage.
As a resident of Massachusetts I found this very interesting. Question....if we could go back to 1630 Boston, would we understand the language? Or would it be difficult?
The revolutionary war actually started in Portsmouth. New Hampshire at Fort William and Mary, which is now for constitution. A few years ago our governor proclaimed that we did start the American revolution. The sons of liberty made the first aggressive act against the British Crown by stealing breaking into and stealing their ammunition and there was. Violence at that time in the battle and that ammunition was the ammunition for Bunker Hill and Lexington. Conquered, we need to take what's due imports with New Hampshire. With governor John Langdon, the signer of the Constitution and the one who started the first aggressive. Use an app against the british
I grew up on this Beans and Ham hawks except Grandma would put a Dollop of Molasses for taste, tsp of Ginger, she said keeps you from Tooting and Apple Dumplings made with apple sauce and Flour put in an hour before serving
I come to this channel to actually watch you make recipes according to the recipe not to see you change it by "prepping the beans" in a pressure cooker first. This is the first time in 10 years I'm giving one of your videos a thumbs down.
