Baking a pot of beans.

Baked beans. © Ryan Schierling

Family recipes were the hook that reeled us in to blogging about food. We are nostalgic ones at heart, and were just looking for a way to give all those tenuously-preserved, barely-written-down mealtime staples a place to live on with some degree of veracity.

The funny thing I've learned along the way is that the recipes from my family share several things in common: they are typically minimal in ingredients, the recipes are virtually never deviated from, and even in light of these first two facts, they are universally the most nebulously documented recipes I've ever encountered. The sauces are “to taste." The quantities are sometimes not even estimated because the cook is presumed to “just know." These are the kind of recipes where, if you haven't had the privilege of standing at the cook's side carefully observing the nuances, and tasting along the way when a dish has been prepared, you have to call upon a family member who has been in that place a time or two and taken very good notes.

My family's recipe for baked beans is exactly this kind of recipe. It is a five-ingredient wonder that came by way of my great-great-grandmother (my father's mother's father's mother) who immigrated from England via Canada. I have no way of knowing how much it has, in fact, evolved over the years. Judging by my family's dogged recipe loyalty – not a single iota. But, judging by the inclusion of molasses – there was, almost certainly, a touch of New England (Boston-style) influence somewhere along the way.

Best I can tell, it's been a recipe more akin to an oral tradition than a secret formula. I have been given this recipe three ways, all with the same ingredients. One simply described verbally in the tradition of a “to taste” formula, and two which vary mostly on the amounts of sugar (noting that one didn't even offer the quantities for the beans or tomato juice). So, I've stitched the pieces together and offer this detailed recipe which I present only as a benevolent guideline for successfully making my great-great-grandma Scott's baked beans.