Satuday’s and Sunday’s are for Nascar and a pot o beans. I get out the old cast iron dutch oven and soak some beans. My friends and family are always asking for my recipe. Well, there really is no recipe as I just soak whichever beans look good to me – usually decided by their color and dependent on my mood. Ingredients are decided in the same way and dependent on availability. I have been accused of holding my recipe’s back. Once again, I say, there is no recipe I just throw whatever in the pot.
I learned how to make beans while camping and fishing with friends. Some from Maine, others from Arkansas with many of them born in the 1890’s.
This subject, cooking beans, led me on an internet quest to find out how many types of beans there are. I have quite a collection but how many are there really? There are over 14,000 species of the Fabaceae family (formerly called Leguminosae) but only some 20 types are actually grown in any quantity as a human food. Each type as many varieties. I have started to compile a list – I know – retentive.
If you have read this far you might like these recipe’s from old cookbooks:
Pork and Beans
–Take two quarts of dried white beans, (the small ones are best,) pick out any imperfections, and put them to soak in cold water, more than to cover them, let them remain one night; the next day, about two hours before dinner time, throw off the water; have a pound of nicely corned pork, a rib piece is best; put the beans in an iron dinner-pot; score the rind or skin of the pork, in squares or diamonds, and lay it on the beans, put in hot (not boiling) water to them, add a small dried red pepper, or a saltspoon-ful of cayenne; cover the pot close, and set it over a gentle fire for one hour; then take a tin basin, or earthen pudding-pan, rub the inside over with a bit of butter, and nearly fill it with the boiled beans, lay the pork in the centre, pressing it down a little; put small bits of butter over the beans, dredge a little flour oer them, and the pork, and set it in a moderately hot oven, for nearly one hour…”
—Mrs. Crowen’s American Lady’s Cook Book [New York] 1847 (p. 115)
Mrs. Goodfellows Cookery, 1865
What would beans be without Johnnie Cakes (Hoe Cakes) that Confederate soldiers enjoyed with their meals.
Johnnie Cakes
two cups of cornmeal
2/3 cup of milk
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon of saltMix ingredients into a stiff batter and form eight dodgers (biscuit-sized). Spoon the batter into hot cooking oil in a frying pan over a low flame. Remove the corn dodgers and let cool on a paper towel, spread with a little butter or molasses.