A Saga of Baked Beans
The real thing.
Homemade Are Best
A staple of cowboys and lumberjacks, baked beans are hearty and healthy. If made with grandma's instructions, the dish is wonderful. If tipped out of a can it is usually insipid.
The Food that Opened the West
Long before colonists arrived in North America, our First Nations people were eating beans. They planted the “Three Sisters” crops—corn, squash, and beans—close together in the belief they nourished each other. It was a system of farming that dates back at least 3,500 years.
When European colonists arrived, they saw that beans were a crop that thrived in the continent. High in fibre, protein, and other nutrients, beans became a staple of their diet. As caravans of settlers moved west, beans were loaded in quantity into the chuck wagons.
Easy to store and cook, the favourite varieties on the trail were pinto, kidney, black, and navy beans, with pintos the go-to bean. They were used to add nutrition to soups and stews, or alone with cornbread.
Kent Rollings in one of his Cowboy Cooking videos notes that “There was always coffee, and there was biscuits, but a thing that was there every meal, guarantee you, was beans.”
The cast iron pot over an open fire, as portrayed in countless Western movies, was the cooking method, accompanied by a twangy guitar and harmonica music. Plus, the collateral damage of bean consumption.
At this point, you are entitled to expect a nan-generated recipe, but neither of my grandmothers made baked beans from scratch.
In post-war Britain, where I was growing up, if you wanted baked beans there was only one option—open a can of the H.J. Heinz concoction.
Created in 1967, the catch-phrase “Heinz Meanz Beanz” is one of the most successful marketing slogans of all time
Despite their popularity, canned beans are no match for those simmered in molasses, brown sugar, onion, bacon, and all the many additions of the homemade variety.
An internet search delivers more than a dozen pages of recipes for the real thing, several of them labelled “Nan's” or “Grandma's.”
Baked Beans, Lumberjacks, and the Poop Study
It seems to have fallen to a gentleman named Edward Mansfield to have done the fieldwork. In the winters of 1901-02 and 1902-03 he was dispatched to the deep woods of Maine to collect the poop of lumberjacks.
The reason for sending Mansfield off on what was probably not a heavily sought after assignment was to examine the nutrition of men engaged in hard, physical labour.
Six Canadian lumberjacks were recruited for a week-long study. Everything they ate was carefully catalogued and the subsequent feces was collected.
Sealed in jars, the poop was preserved in a snowbank before being taken back to the University of Maine in Orono. Imagine the excitement when those jars were opened in the laboratory and the contents analyzed.
Some of the study participants.
What Mansfield and his colleagues discovered was that, while the lumberjack diet included beef, pork, potatoes, cabbage, cakes, and pies, the overwhelmingly important item on the menu was baked beans.
The report of the study revealed the use of something known as the “bean hole.” This was, as its name suggests, a hole in the ground over which was built a small log structure. After the beans were parboiled they were layered with salt pork in an iron kettle.
“A fire is then built in the bean hole with both soft and hard wood to a depth of 2 feet, and when well under way is covered with stones and old iron, when the covered pot of beans is suspended over the fire ... The pot of beans is then placed directly upon these, covered with hot ashes and earth and left to cook overnight, usually twelve to four- teen hours. In the morning the beans come from the hole steaming hot and are served for breakfast.”
The bean hole and its attendant.
Each lumberjack ate between “a pound to a pound and a half, furnishing from 10 to 16 percent of their 6,000 to 8,000 daily calories and one-fifth to one-third of their protein intake” (Atlas Obscura).
Bonus Factoids
- Canned baked beans are not baked at all, they are steamed.
- According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), “It has for years been recognized by consumers generally that the designation 'Beans with Pork' or 'Pork and Beans' is the common or usual name for an article of commerce that contains very little pork.”
- Boston, Massachusetts is often called “Beantown,” because of its long association with, you guessed it, beans. Would the same dish also account for Chicago being known as the “Windy City?”
- Molasses is a crucial ingredient in Boston Baked Beans. Huge quantities of the sticky stuff were stored in the city as feedstock for the rum distilling industry. In 1919, a huge storage tank broke and 21 people died in the tidal wave of molasses.
- The world's biggest baked bean factory is in Wigan, England. The Heinz facility produces three million cans a day and 85 percent of them are sold in the United Kingdom.
- During World War II, the British government designated baked beans to be an “essential food.”
- The FDA permits certain levels of contaminants to be present in food. For example, canned tomato products, such as baked beans, may contain up to one maggot per 500 grams (17.6 ounces). There are also allowable levels of rodent hair and “mammalian excreta.” No. Just no.
Baked bean contaminant not permitted under FDA rules.
Sources
- “Why Did the Indigenous People of the Americas Grow the Three Sisters?” Dr. Sonali Mookerjee, scienceabc.com, October 1, 2024.
- “Cowboy Cuisine: Uncovering the Beans That Fueled the Wild West Trail.” Ethan Wilson, mealsbetter.com, June 19, 2024.
- Kent Rollins Cowboy Cooking.
- “Studies of the Food of Maine Lumbermen.” C.D. Woods and E.R. Mansfield, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1904.
- “Eat Like a 19th-Century Lumberjack With This Recipe.” Paula Marcoux, Atlas Obscura, July 28, 2023.
- “The Secret History of Baked Beans.” Ella Buchan, lovefood.com, July 15, 2020.
- “9 Disgusting Things That the FDA Allows in Your Food.” Sara G. Miller, www.livescience.com, July 28, 2016.
This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.
© 2024 Rupert Taylor
