Thursdays Are For Cooking… Beans!
I like bean soup a lot. There are so many ways to fix it, from using a variety of canned beans to soaking a bag of dry bean mixture overnight.
In addition to bean soup, there are baked beans. The modern method is open a can (or soak the dry beans), make up the sauce and add that plus onions and chopped bacon and chopped sausage, or just buy the canned seasoned beans, put them in an ovenproof pan with your favorite sauce, and cover them with foil, bake for an hour at 350F, and then put them on the plate. The modern method of cooking beans includes adding vegetables, broth, seasonings, ham or sausage, and letting it simmer slowly.
So when I ran across Ron Townsends a while back, and his explorations into 18th century cooking and living, I found that he offers two ways of making baked beans from scratch, following those 250-year=old cooking methods. One way is to cook them in a covered pot on the working firebrick “stovetop”, and the other is to put the beans into a covered pot and cook them in a pit. Mind you, modern ranges as closed stoves did not come into existence until the very late 18th or early 19th century. Up until then, cooking everything was done in the fireplace and on what is called an open range, which is essentially what he shows us when he starts the fire on the firebrick surface outside that little oven in the wall.
Before you decide it’s too primitive for you, what is it we do when we cook food over an open fire on a campout? Yes, knowing about these very old-fashioned methods and how to use them properly is a good part of survivalism.
Here’s his video on the subject, and you will notice that he does not soak the beans first, to speed up cooking time.
He simply shows us how to bake beans the 18th century way, both in the oven and in a pit, so that we don’t have to work on the Sabbath Day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckELeAo-Lzo
Beans Beans the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot, the more you toot the better you feel so eat your beans at every meal. Bean so long since I ate them. How about “Been So Long” by the
Pastels 1957 on the Mascot label
Customer at lunch counter: “What is this?”
Waiter: “It’s bean soup, sir!”
Customer: I don’t care what it’s been, I want to know what it is now!”
Ba Da Dum! Kish!
My wife makes a bean soup using the bone from spiral cut ham, with molasses and onion. Don’t clean the bone off very well so there’s lots of ham chunks in the soup. Served up with a big hunk of garlic bread it makes a great dinner.
I will be so glad when the summer weather goes right back out to California and I can start real cookin’ again.
Just thought you all might get a few ideas about how to make life work if things go sour.
No! Don’t send it here. Temps over 99° for ten days and no relief in site…
I cook for several older folks (four vets) but too hot to turn on stove so slow cooker or the pot…
My cat is sleeping on plastic shopping bags because they are cooler than the couch, and the cooling pad I got for her is even less effective.
Tomorrow, temps are supposed to drop a bit, then drop a lot by Sunday. Hope that happens for you, too.
Oven proof pan = cast iron skillet/pot/dutch oven which can also be used as fire pit/place/brick oven. There is a very nice selection of cast iron cookware in and around Firebase Magnolia, including assorted sizes of dutch ovens (with the coal holding lids), all well used, well seasoned, and very cherished.
And if you properly plan your eating schedules, no need to presoak, just allow enough time for the cooking process. And beans with any type of beast is a good meal. Don’t forget the cat heads, cornbread/pone, crusty bread for sopping.
Have made multitudes of meals around a campfire and Grandmother cooked for decades on a wood burner…year round. Beats the hell out of a chunk of C-4.
5th/77th, if I could move to a place where I could have a woodburning cast iron stove for both heat and cooking, I’d go in a heartbeat.
As it is, EPA stuff has things all hinky right now, thanks to the ecohippies who have invaded and nearly destroyed what used to be the real Democrat party.
The only thing I’d want is a screen on the chimney pot to keep sparks from flying out and birds from nesting there in the spring. And a nice open Rumford design fireplace in the living room would be good, too.
Roger that. Grandmother’s only advantage was she was (a) used to it, (b) the kitchen was separate from the main house, with tall ceilings cross ventilated with windows and doors, (c) had no other choice. Natural gas wasn’t available, house would have required being totally rewired to add a stove, and she didn’t have the funds for a propane tank.
With the burn ban we have now, you prolly couldn’t even cook on a wood burning stove except between the end of Oct and the FIRST of May. Brother in Dakota has a wood pellet stove in the finished basement area that they use full time in the winter. Works real well.
Had a situation ’bout 19 – 24 years ago where the little house I was in then had no AC at all and only a small gas fire logs in a coal designed fire place. Did all of my fire type cooking on an open fire or grill, outside between 9 pm and midnight in the summer months. Everything else was in a crock pot. Re-heating in a microwave. Winter was long johns, wool socks, and Ms Thang.
Now-a-days, all oven work is either done late at night, if at all, or in the Dutch Oven on the outside grill/fire pit…after it cools off. And I ain’t skeered to pour the BTUs to that Trane sitting out there. It may be 100-105 outside right now, but it is a balmy 69 sitting on this couch.
We do what we gotta do.
Thanks Ex! Our crew LOVES beans and bean dishes and bean soups.
I love bean soup! My wife doesn’t love the fact I love bean soup. Or cabbage.