BEAN TOWN BEANS
America’s native people were baking beans long before the arrival of Europeans. In New England the Iroquois, Narragansett and Penobscot tribes combined beans, maple syrup and bear fat in earthenware pots which they placed in pits lined with hot rocks and cooked slowly over long periods of time.
By the 17th century British colonists were substituting brown sugar for the maple syrup, bacon or ham for the bear fat and they simmered the beans for hours in pots over a fire instead of underground. They also may have used their knowledge of cooking European dishes like cassoulet to further modify the cooking techniques by soaking the beans overnight and parboiling them over a fire before baking them in order to decrease the cooking time. In Colonial times baked beans became a Saturday night staple when cooking on the Sabbath was forbidden and beans could simmer on the hearth all night and offer a post church Sunday repast.
Inherited English regional food traditions, including each colony’s preferred method of cooking, may also have contributed to the evolution of baked beans: Chesapeake colonists inherited their preference for frying and fricasseeing from culinary traditions in Southern England; the Quaker settlers in the Mid-Atlantic showed a preference for boiling, like their ancestors in Northern England; and finally, baking is the norm in Eastern England, the origin point of the Puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
In the 18th century molasses became popular as a sweetening agent for beans in order to avoid British taxes on sugar. Boston, otherwise known as “Bean Town”, is well known for its colonial opposition to British taxes and for its molasses style baked beans. Molasses are a byproduct of sugar production, and Boston participated in the triangular trade by taking Caribbean molasses and using it to distill rum in Massachusetts. By the late 19th century, Fanny Farmer included baked beans, made with molasses, ground mustard and salt pork, in her Boston Cooking School Cookbook. 19th century cookbooks published in New England spread the recipes throughout the United States and Canada, moving baked beans from a regional specialty to a North American fixture at barbecues and picnics.
Boston even experienced a molasses tank explosion. In 1919 one of the Purity Distilling Company’s tanks exploded near Boston’s Inner Harbor sending a reported tidal wave of 12,000 tons of sticky, thick, brown molasses gushing from a fractured two story tank, crushing buildings, killing 21 people and injuring another 150. Residents today say that if the weather is hot, the aroma of molasses still permeates the area.
