Quick Brown Bread

If you had to pick one thing that was synonymous with Saturday night suppers when I was growing up it would have to be the Baked Bean Supper. I am not sure if this is a Canadian maritime thing or not, but Saturday night in our home usually meant baked beans.

Sometimes my mother would serve them with ham and scalloped potatoes as I have shown them here today, and sometimes it would be wieners . . .

Sometimes we would have oatmeal brown bread and sometimes we would have steamed brown bread . . . sometimes it would just be white bread and butter, but there was always bread of some sort.

All the better to sop up all of those delicious juices from my mother's baked beans. They were so good you didn't want even a morsel to go to waste. If it had been polite to lick our plates we would have been licking our plates.

Mom always started her beans on Friday night. She always used dried pea beans, or dried haricot beans as they are called over here in the UK. She would pick them all over and rinse them really well. Sometimes you might find the odd stone in a bag and it was surprising that they could sometimes be a bit dirty. Then they would be put into her large saucepan and covered with cold water to soak overnight.

Next morning, bright and early she would bring them to the boil and then simmer them just until the skins began to split when you put a couple on a fork and blew on them. You knew then they were ready for the bean crock. Oh, and a pinch of baking soda went into the water as well. Any foam that rose to the top would be skimmed off and discarded.

Mom had an old stoneware bean crock. She would put the simmered beans into the pot with only enough water that you could see it through the beans. Molasses and some brown sugar would be stirred into them along with a bit of apple cider vinegar, a spoonful of tomato ketchup, dry mustard powder, some salt and some pepper.

A whole peeled brown onion would be pushed down into the centre of them and then a slab of salt pork would be set on top. The lid would be placed onto the crock and they would be put into a slow oven where the smell of them baking would serve to tantalise us all the day through!

Oh boy but they were some good. Mom always kept a container of the leftovers frozen in the freezer, even after we had all gotten married and left home.

You could almost guarantee that when we came home for a visit some would be thawed out and our first supper would be mom's home baked beans and brown bread. We didn't really want anything fancy. Just that simple meal.

It makes me a bit sad that I will never again have the pleasure of sitting down to my mom's homemade baked beans and brown bread . . . I know I can make them myself, but somehow what I make never ever comes up to what the memory of hers tastes like.

Yield: Makes one loaf

Author: Marie Rayner