Despite the unfortunate Phaseolus vulgaris moniker—the American Common Bean category includes bunches of beloved, native-to-the-Americas beans: navy, red kidney, pinto, great northern, marrow, & yellow eye, plus garden variety edible-pod beans (string, stringless and snap.) It’s not clear which of these the New England colonists first stewed in a pot, but we do know baked navy beans started with Native Americans. The Narragansett, Penobscot, and Iroiquois wrapped navy beans in deerskins—or put them in earthenware pots, along with venison, bear fat and maple syrup and then baked the lot in hot-stone-lined pits. Puritans eschewed the deerskins, but took to bean-pot cookery because the long, slow cook times meant housewives could prepare the beans a day ahead, and in so doing, stick to Puritanical no-cooking-on-Sabbath rules.

Eventually molasses–the sticky-sweet sugar-refining byproduct used to make rum in colonial Boston, found its way into the beanpot, sealing the beans-and-Boston partnership that lasted long after no-cooking-on-Sabbath waned.

Molasses was also used to make brown bread, itself an adaptive-use product Colonists created due to the shortage of wheat flour. Wheat didn’t grow well in the Colonies, but rye and corn did. So to stretch what wheat they had, the Colonists created “thirded” breads–made with equal parts corn, rye and wheat flour. Earliest examples of the resulting loaves were yeast-raised and less sweet, but sometime later in the 19th century, the pudding-like practice of sweetening the bread with raisins and more molasses and steaming it in a mold, became common.

This recipe for Boston Brown Bread, a slight update on Cheryl & Bill Jamison’s version in their 1999 classic, American Home Cooking, is very similar to the Boston Brown Bread published in the 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book. It has all of the same ingredients, save two. What makes it different/better is the addition of an egg, and, substitution of cooking oil for 1 cup of the sour milk (buttermilk here.) It’s astonishing that such a hearty grain trio–rye, coarsely-ground corn, and whole wheat–yields such a moist, tender and flavorful loaf! But putting those dry ingredients with molasses, baking soda and buttermilk works food-chemistry magic: The finished bread most closely resembles the best bran muffin you ever had.

Our recipe for Boston Baked Beans is a standard we’ve used for years–source indeterminable, although it matches most of the recipes we have here in multiple vintage cookbooks. We do include some ginger in it, which enhances the dry-mustard spice in the mix.

The biggest challenge you’ll have with either of these recipes is that they take time. For best results with the beans, you’ll need to soak them overnight and then slow-bake them in the oven for 7 or 8 hours (cut that to 5 to 6 if you have a convection oven.) And it will take you a good hour-and-one-half or more to steam the bread. The results are worth it!