Burnt My Fingers

Bean Hole Beans?

Beans are on my mind today because I saw an ad on Facebook from Bush’s Beans: “Your Fam on a Can”. Submit a custom label with two lines and a maximum of 10 letters each; if it meets other, unspecified criteria, they will send you a (empty) keepsake bean can with that label. My requested family brand “Maxwell’s Propulsion” evidently did not pass muster but the experience was still valuable because, while reading comments on the Facebook ad, I noticed a lot of praise from folks who had visited the Bush’s museum and visitor center in Dandridge, TN. There you can eat in their café and get a sampler of baked beans with your meal, a hot dog topped with chili beans and a slice of pecan pie made with beans for dessert. Culinary tourism opportunity!

I also learned that Bush’s remains a private, family-owned company which warmed my heart. I have always picked up a few cans of Bush’s when they are on sale, though I intend to doctor them so could probably do just as well with a generic bean. (For large quantities I’d go for the dirt-cheap Grandma Brown’s Baked Beans, but they went out of business during the pandemic.) On my most recent shopping trip I discovered Bush’s Country Style, a bean that is “thicker, sweeter, richer with bacon & extra brown sugar”. The price was the same as their other baked beans, so who wouldn’t want this one? Only problem is it limits the opportunity for tinkering; the Country Style bean sauce was indeed thick and rich and I limited myself to a scoop of dehydrated onions and a splash each of Worcestershire and cider vinegar and was good to go.

Easy Baked Beans.

The label on my Country Style advises  “the contrasting flavors of sweet baked beans and any of your savory favorites bring out the best in each other”. Simple enough: baked beans are supposed to be sweet, unlike spicy chili beans or Cuban black beans with their payload of onion, garlic and olive oil, or Snow’s smoky pinto beans.

My mother was not an adventurous cook but she prepared a fine baked bean dish which involved fiddling with a can of generic baked beans (I expect she used Campbells) and baking with strips of bacon and rounds of sliced onion on top until the liquid evaporated. It is an easy and reliable recipe which we’ve featured here.

Whenever those beans were served, my father would mutter in a thoughtful way, “bean hole beans”. I was not as curious then as now about food trivia so never asked him why he said that. But it turns out bean hole beans are kind of a shaggy dog story which has been captured on AllRecipes as well as this NYTimes article, both of which describe a very complex process for digging a hole in the ground for your dutch oven full of beans before acknowledging you can make the same recipe in a crockpot. The Times says the original recipe came from the Abenaki people, which brings us full circle because they were the original inhabitants of my frost-kissed region of upstate New York. My father never made it upstate as far as I know, but he did live in Boston in his youth and frequented the old-school (and sadly departed) Durgin Park Restaurant where he might have encountered a dish named “bean hole beans”. Or maybe he just liked the sound of the words.