baked beans

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Baked beans on toast

Baked Beans [ beɪkt ˈbiːnz ] ( listen ? / I ) (English for baked beans ) are a traditional British and American dish made from white beans baked in the oven with tomato sauce or ketchup . Baked beans are an integral part of the English breakfast and in the USA they are a popular side dish for barbecues . Audio file / audio sample

For preparation, dried white beans are first soaked in water for a few hours, seasoned with tomato sauce and molasses or brown sugar . Then the beans are placed in an ovenproof dish, covered with a few slices of bacon and cooked in a closed vessel over medium heat for three to four hours.

The white beans that are usually used for the preparation come from the species Phaseolus vulgaris and thus originally from America. They came to Europe with the European colonizers. Already the natives of North America prepared white beans together with maple syrup and bear fat in a hole in the ground filled with hot stones or hot ashes. In the course of time, the European settlers replaced the hole in the ground with a pot, the maple syrup with another syrup and the bear fat with pork fat. Tomato sauce was an integral part of the dish until the end of the 19th century.

The adapted preparation was particularly popular in the states of New England . In the 19th century, baked beans with dark bread were the standard main course on Sundays. Among other things, this enabled Christian families in New England to avoid everyday work by cooking on Holy Sunday. Families either baked the beans in their oven or, if they did not have their own oven, brought them to the bakery on Saturday evening to pick them up on Sunday. A typical New England recipe from 1857 was:

“Take a liter and a half of white beans and put them in cold water overnight. Take them out the next morning, wash and clean them well, then pour them into a saucepan and cook them until tender. Then pour them into a clay jar. Cut a nice piece of pork and put it on top of the beans. Bake everything until it's browned well. This is a good dish for a winter's day. "

As many families replaced their traditional brick ovens with smaller iron ovens in the course of the 19th century, the number of beans baked by bakers increased during this period. Molasses spread as an addition around 1870. Compared to traditional dishes, the proportion of molasses in particular increased in the 20th century. Today's baked beans are usually significantly sweeter than their predecessors in the 18th and 19th centuries. Baked beans are a staple of everyday cooking there, and Boston is nicknamed Bean Town . Church suppers are still held regularly on Sundays in Christian communities in many rural New England communities. Baked beans and bread are the main course of the social gathering in the community. In rural or tourist areas in Maine , the beans are occasionally still traditionally prepared in the ground. The court migrated from New England to England.

Baked beans are also commercially available as canned goods. They were one of the first dishes ever to be canned. In 1867, the Burnham & Morrill (B&M) company from Portland, Maine produced "Baked Beans from the Brick Oven". The importance of baked beans in Anglo-American countries is so great that they are counted as a separate product group next to tomatoes and all other vegetables in the current industry statistics. In the UK, for example, sales of baked beans are two-thirds of sales of all other canned vegetables combined. Unlike other canned vegetables, the consumption of baked beans is strongly influenced by certain brands, and the advertising budget for baked beans is far higher than for other comparable products. Baked beans are also produced on a global scale by other companies than other canned vegetables.

A similar dish - Foul Medammes  - is widespread in the Arab world  . This is usually prepared with fava beans from Asia . The gigantes (fire beans baked in the oven with tomato sauce) of Greek cuisine are also comparable .

Web links

Commons : Baked beans  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Baked Beans  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations (English)

Remarks

  1. Heinz: Baked beans in tomato sauce .
  2. a b Ruth Tobias: Beans. In: Andrew F. Smith (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. Oxford University Press, Oxford u. a. 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-530796-2 , p. 39.
  3. ^ A b c Susan Williams: Food in the United States, 1820s – 1890. Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. a. 2006, ISBN 0-313-33245-2 , p. 108.
  4. Alice L. McLean: Cooking in America, 1840-1945. Greenwood Press, Westport CT et al. a. 2006, ISBN 0-313-33574-5 .
  5. ^ John Sutton: Sunk Costs and Market Structure. Price Competition, Advertising, and the Evolution of Concentration. MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. a. 1991, ISBN 0-262-19305-1 , p. 421.