t
lay over Boston baked beans, you had better sweep the cook out of camp.

This is how to cook them: Put a pound or a little more of clean pork
in the kettle, with water enough to cover it. Let it boil slowly half
an hour. In the meantime, wash and parboil one pint of beans. Drain the
water from the pork and place the beans around it; add two quarts of
water and hang the kettle where it will boil steadily, but not rapidly,
for two hours. Pare neatly and thinly five or six medium sized potatoes
and allow them from thirty to forty minutes (according to size and
variety), in which to cook. They must be pressed down among the beans
so as to be entirely covered. If the beans be fresh and fine they will
probably fall to pieces before time is up. This, if they are not
allowed to scorch, makes them all the better. If a portion of pork be
left over, it is excellent sliced very thin when cold and eaten with
bread. The above is a dinner for three or four hungry men.

It is usually the case that some of the party prefer baked beans. To
have these in perfection, add one gill of raw beans and a piece of pork
three inches square to the foregoing proportions. Boil as above, until
the beans begin to crack open; then fork out the smaller piece of pork,
place it in the center of your largest cooking tin, take beans enough
from the kettle to nearly fill the tin, set it over a bright fire on
the range, invert the second sized tin for a cover, place live,
hardwood coals on top and bake precisely as directed for bread--only,
when the coals on top become dull and black, brush them off, raise the
cover and take a look. If the beans are getting too dry, add three or
four spoonfuls of liquor from the kettle, replace cover and coals, and
let them bake until they are of a rich light brown on top. Then serve.
It is a good dish. If Boston can beat it, I don't want to lay up
anything for old age.

Brown bread and baked beans have a natural connection in the average
American mind, and rightly. They supplement each other, even as spring
lamb and green peas with our transatlantic cousins. But there is a
better recipe for brown bread than is known to the dwellers of the Hub--
one that has captured first prizes at country fairs and won the
approval of epicures from Maine to Minnesota; the one that brought
honest old Greeley down, on his strictures anent "country bread." And
here is the recipe; take it for what it is worth and try it fairly
before condem