Baked bean

“ Add sufficient water, nut or dairy cream or milk to mashed beans, peas or lentils to make of the consistency of a thick batter. No sauce is required.
★ Rich Baked Beans
Wash beans and get them into boiling salted water, in the bean pot, as quickly as possible. For each pint of beans use 11⁄4 to 13⁄4 teaspn. of salt. Add plenty of water at first, perhaps three times the quantity of beans. Put into a hot oven until they begin to boil, then reduce the temperature to such a degree as will keep them just simmering for from 12 to 24 hours. ”

“ A little salt and some molasses, the quantity depending on the taste, will complete the list. Pour in enough hot water to cover the beans. Put on the cover of the pot, and set in the hot ashes of the bean hole, just before you go to bed. Rake the coals over it, put a few sticks on top, so the ashes will keep hot, and go to bed. In the morning rake out the bean pot, and you will find them nicely baked, and redolent of that aroma so dear to every Yankee. If you do not relish it, so much the worse for you, and so much the better for the rest of the party, for there will be more for them. ”

“ Before science made its discovery, the blacks were very positive on the point of the poisonous qualities of the bean, and took measures to eliminate it. In some parts of the State the beans, after being steeped in water for several days, are dried in the sun, roasted in hot ashes, and pounded between stones into a coarse kind of meal, which may be kept for an indefinite period. When required for use the meal is mixed with water, made into a thin cake or damper, and baked in the ashes. ”

“ Boston Baked Beans
1 quart beans
1/2 pound salt pork
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
2 tablespoons molasses
Wash and soak beans over night. Put half into bean pot; wash salt pork and place in center; add remainder of beans, salt, pepper, mustard, molasses and 4 cups cold water; cover. Put into slow oven and bake 8 hours. Add more water if needed. ”

“ Beans are a nice winter vegetable, but cooked with pork as "baked beans," are too strong for daily use, but are a desirable article of food cooked more plainly. Choose the small white beans, put them in a saucepan with as much cold water, as will cover them well and a small pinch of baking soda; when they have simmered a few minutes drain off the water and replace it with hot water and a little salt; if possible let them cook without boiling hard; when tender drain, and dish with a liberal piece of butter and a dust of pepper. ”

“ BAKED BEANS WITH TOMATO SAUCE
Prepare the beans as for plain baked beans; put into the jars to bake; cover with a mixture of strained stewed tomatoes and water in equal proportions; a little butter or olive oil may be added.
SUCCOTASH Fresh shelled lima beans, 2 cups. Sweet corn, 2 ears. Cream, 1⁄2 cup. Butter, size of an egg. Salt.
Put beans in pot with cold water, rather more than will cover them. Scrape the kernels from twelve ears of young sweet corn. Put the cobs in with the peas, boiling from thirty to forty-five minutes. Take out the cobs and put in the scraped corn. ”

“ In France, some parts of Italy, and Russia, on Twelfth Night, children eat a cake in which has been baked a white Bean and a black Bean. The children to whose lot fall the portions of cake containing the Beans become the King and Queen of the evening.——An old English charm to cure warts is to take the shell of a broad Bean, and rub the affected part with the inside thereof ”

“ Throw them into boiling water for a minute, then pour the water away. Heat for a pound of beans one and one-half pints of milk, stir in four ounces of salt butter, a very little chopped parsley, salt and pepper. Do not let the milk boil, but when it simmers put in the beans. When they have been heated for ten minutes, thicken your sauce with the yolks of two eggs and a tablespoonful of cream. Take out a bean and eat it to see if it is cooked, and if so, pour all on a hot dish. Garnish with fried sippets of bread. Old broad beans can be treated in the same way, but they must first be skinned. ”

“ A large number of the varieties of both the green-podded and the wax-podded beans are used almost exclusively as snap beans, to be eaten with the pod while tender. The various strains of the Black Wax are the most popular string beans. The pole or running beans are used either green or dried, and the Limas, both tall and dwarf, are well known for their superior flavor either as shelled or dry beans. The old-fashioned Cranberry or Horticultural Lima type (a pole form of Phaseolus vulgaris) is probably the best shell bean, but the trouble of poling makes it unpopular. ”

“ Bean flour is not only thought more nutritive, but is found to be more abundant than that of oats. Beans are chiefly applied to the feeding of horses, hogs, and other domestic animals; and it is supposed that meal-men often grind them amongst wheat, the flour of which is to be made into bread. By some persons they are roasted, and adopted as a substitute for coffee. With the Roman ladies bean-flour was in much repute as a cosmetic.
Garden-beans are almost wholly confined to culinary uses. What are called French-beans, and Kidney-beans, belong to a different tribe from the present. ”

“ When they begin to grow soft, stew them over a hot fire several minutes, with a heaping tea spoonful of saleratus. Then take them up with a skimmer, and put them in a baking pot, gash a lb. of pork and put it down in the pot so as to have the beans just cover it, pour in cold water till you can see it at the top. They will bake in a hot oven in the course of three hours; but they will be better to remain in it five or six. Beans are very good stewed, without being baked. ”

“ Put a large tablespoonful of fresh lard in a skillet and when sizzling-hot add the drained beans. Mix beans and lard thoroughly until each bean seems to have a coating of the fat and begins to burst. Add a cupful of the liquid in which the beans were boiled and gently crush a few of the beans with the spoon to thicken the gravy. Add the remainder of the bean liquor and a chopped chile pepper and simmer until the beans are quite dry. ”

“ Twice as much nitrogen is found in beans as in wheat; and they rank so near to animal food, that by the addition of a little fat they practically can take its place. Bacon and beans have thus been associated for centuries, and New England owes to Assyria the model for the present Boston bean-pot. In the best table-bean, either Lima or the butter-bean, will be found in a hundred parts, thirty of nitrogen, fifty-six of starch, one and a half of cellulose, two of fatty matter, three and a half of saline, and eight and a half of water. ”

“ Cook tiny string beans until tender in boiling salted water; season while hot with onion juice, salt, pepper and tarragon vinegar. When cold add oil and toss the beans about until each bean is coated with the oil. Fill the centre of the jelly, fashioned in a ring mould, with the beans, and sprinkle over them a fine-chopped pimento. Garnish with lettuce leaves. Fine-chopped chives may be used in the place of the onion juice; they are particularly appropriate in any bean salad. If the beans are large, cut in halves lengthwise and the halves crosswise. ”

“ Empty them into a colander and then put them in the bean pot, or if you haven’t a bean pot, a deep baking dish will do. Put in a quarter of a cup of molasses and a half cup of butter and pour a little hot water over the beans. Keep them all day long in an oven that is not too hot. Don’t put any mustard in your beans; mustard is as great an enemy to the human stomach as pepper, and that is saying a good deal.
Against a rainy day when you may wish to amuse yourselves with additional dishes, or a hungry day when you are cold and ravenous, I will add a few more recipes. Corn pone is good. ”

“ It is, though, considered a sign of extreme poverty to be seen eating them at any meal other than a lunch or hurried repast.
Of the vegetables, the petsae or white cabbage is the most widely cultivated.
Beans grow luxuriantly. Fully one-half of the crop is crushed for the sake of the oil, the residue being pressed into bricks and used as a fertilizer.
"Bean curds" is a very popular dish, especially for breakfast. The beans are ground to a flour, which is passed through three strainers of coarse, medium fine and very fine linen. ”

“ Taking the Crop.—The pods should be gathered for use when the seeds are comparatively young, or when they are of the size of a marrowfat-pea. As a general rule, all vegetables are most tender and delicate when young; and to few [Pg 505] esculents does this truth apply with greater force than to the class of plants to which the English Bean belongs.
Use.—The seeds are used in their green state, cooked and served in the same manner as shelled kidney-beans. The young pods are sometimes, though rarely, used as string-beans. ”

“ When very young and very small, it is better not to cut them, but simply take off the tops and tails, and a thin stringy strip at each side of the bean, then wash, but do not leave them in water. Throw them into a saucepan of fast-boiling water, with 1 tablespoonful salt to each 1⁄2 gal. water. Boil quickly, with lid off, till tender, and at once drain in a colander, taking care to shake or press gently with a wooden spoon, every drop of water from them; serve very hot, with pieces of fresh butter between each layer of beans. ”

“ There is, perhaps, no other vegetable dish so cheap and easily cooked, and, at the same time, so agreeable and nourishing. The beans are boiled, and then mixed with a little fat or salt butter, and a little milk or water and flour. From 3,840 parts of kidney-bean Einholff obtained 1,805 parts of matter analogous to starch, 351 of vegeto-animal matter, and 799 parts of mucilage.
HARICOT BEANS AND MINCED ONIONS. 1121. INGREDIENTS.—1 quart of white haricot beans, 4 middling-sized onions, 1/4 pint of good brown gravy, pepper and salt to taste, a little flour. ”

“ DRIED BEANS AND PEAS. When parboiling dried beans for baking, the addition of 1⁄2 teaspoon of baking soda to each 2 cups soaked beans makes the beans tender in a shorter time. When baked, the beans have a much sweeter flavor than those parboiled in plain water. All dried legumes such as lima, soy, kidney or navy beans, and peas, have a better flavor if treated in this manner. ”

“ Heat up, and serve with dried mint, and small cubes of fat bacon fried crisp.
Green-Pea Soup is made in precisely the same way; but the peas will not need soaking [Pg 119] beforehand, and thrifty housewives put in the shells as well.
Harmless and nutritious a vegetable as the Bean would appear to be, it did not altogether find favour with the ancients. Pythagoras, who had quaint ideas on the subject of the human soul, forbade his disciples to eat beans, because they were generated in the foul ooze out of which man was created. ”

“ BEAN SOUP 2 cupfuls beans 3 quarts water Baking soda 1 piece of celery root or 1/2 teaspoonful celery salt or Dried celery leaves l 1/2 tablespoonfuls butter or substitute 2 slices onion Cayenne 1/8 teaspoonful pepper 2 teaspoonfuls salt 1/4 teaspoonful mustard 2 tablespoonfuls flour
Soak the beans overnight; add soda, onion, and celery. Cook slowly until the beans are soft. Add more water, if more than one quart evaporates. Press through a strainer. Use the remainder of the ingredients in making a sauce. The strained beans should be used as the liquid for the sauce (see Thick Soups) . ”

“ There is a Kidney-Bean, we have here, which has a fine relish in it, as the Indians say, but in fact there is none but what they give it by Art. This Bean, when it is full ripe, is taken out of the Shells, and boiled to a Pulp, and that Pulp strain'd till it becomes like Butter; then they put some of all the Spices into it, in Powder, as, Nutmeg, Cloves, Mace, and Pepper, Garlick, and Orange-Juice, or some Mango Pickle. This being well mix'd together, makes an agreeable Sauce, when it is put in any warm Liquor.
To dry Plums with Sugar. From Mr. Girarde. ”

“ By cultivation many varieties have been produced, of which the following are the best known: Broad Bean, an important article of food in Europe and western Asia, and valuable forage plant, grown in gardens and as a field crop. All species of the bean have a very high food value; are relatively cheap in price, but much less easily digested than cereals. Lima Bean, widely cultivated in tropical Africa, sparingly in temperate regions. Production in the United States most extensive in California. ”

“ Black Beans were considered to be male, and white female, the latter being the inferior.——De Gubernatis relates several curious customs connected with Beans. In Tuscany, the fire of St. John is lighted in a Bean-field, so that it shall burn quickly. In Sicily, on Midsummer Eve, Beans are eaten with some little ceremony, and the good St. John is thanked for having obtained the blessings of a bountiful harvest from God. At Modica, in Sicily, on October 1st, a maiden in love will sow two Beans in the same pot. The one represents herself, the other the youth she loves. ”

“ Then the bean dries and drops off—that is all that is left of it, for the germ, or heart, has started growing another plant, you see.
"So don't worry, Mab. Your beans are all right, even if they do seem to be growing upside down. That is the only way they know. From on your beans will grow very fast."
And so they did. Daddy Blake told the children that beans are ready to eat sometimes within six weeks after the seeds are planted. The beans are not ripe, of course, and some are green, while others are yellow, or wax beans. Inside the pods, which are almost like peas, are small green beans. ”