Last time I posted I alluded to a potential non-recipe post. The next Wikipedia page on the list I’m working down right now was for the “Baked Bean Museum of Excellence“, in Port Talbot, Wales.

Back in the mid ’80s Mr. Barry Kirk spent 100 hours in a bathtub full of cold baked beans to raise money for charity. This led him to start amassing baked bean related collectables and memorabilia in his mother’s council flat, where he lived. He also developed an alter ego persona as Captain Beany, a super hero from Planet Beanus, complete with an orange costume with cape and the underwear on the outside. Eventually he legally changed his name to Captain Beany (yes, even his passport uses that name) and performs other baked bean related stunts, such as rolling a can of beans a mile with his nose, for charity.

After his mother died, he decided that he should turn the flat, now in his name, into a museum. It is also still his home, so visiting is by appointment only. You can check out the official website for more information.

I spent a good couple of weeks toying with the idea of taking a trip to Great Britain to visit. There were even some relatively cheap airfares available from Duluth to Cardiff, but ultimately I decided that a trip overseas isn’t in the budget right now. It will go on the list of places to visit when I do plan a trip to the UK though.

Update: 30 minutes after posting this, I found the facebook page of the museum, announcing that it had closed it’s doors a few weeks ago 😦

So, since I’m not traveling across the ocean to review a wacky museum for your, I decided it was time to revisit a recipe I said I’d probably wouldn’t ever bother coming back to.

Sweet and sticky pork and beans was originally posted about two years ago, and at that time I thought the flavor balances were off, and that I already had a similar recipe that was tastier (quick baked beans), so why bother revisiting.

Well, for no particularly compelling reason, I went ahead and came back to it anyway. If you compare the new photo, above, with the old one below, you’ll probably guess right away that I did something different. I cooked them in the crock pot this time, which left them much saucier and less sticky. That, along with the addition of some vinegar made for a very different flavor profile. In fact my wife thought I had just made British baked beans again, because the tomato flavor stayed front and center.

I’m still going to say that this isn’t going to become the recipe I chose to make for a party, but it’s better this way.

Read on below for my original post.

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Pork and beans (or Franks and Beans/Beans and Weiners) is a culinarydish that uses pork and beans as its main ingredients. Numerous variations exist, usually with a more specific name, such as  Fabada Asturiana, Olla podrida, or American canned pork and beans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_and_beans

I’ve been procrastinating this post for over a week. Partly I’ve just been lazy and procrastinating everything else too. But I was also not even sure I wanted to share this particular recipe. This turned into another “doctor up the canned baked-beans” recipe, and frankly my quick baked beans recipe uses mostly the same ingredients and is so much tastier than this one. I’m still not entirely sure I need to share another version, but in the interest of documenting this beany journey I’m on I’ll go ahead and post it here. It’s not that this one is bad, but the flavor balance is off in my opinion- too sweet and too much BBQ sauce, and since I have the other recipe already on my site I’m not going to waste time trying to tweak this one. If you’re a fan of overly sweet and sticky beans maybe this one is for you, but otherwise do yourself a favor and go to the other recipe.

I think the one thing that might redeem this recipe, although I haven’t tried it yet, is the optional pork shoulder. As the New York Times said, back in 1998, pork and beans is “an American canned classic, [and] is recognized by American consumers generally as an article of commerce that contains very little pork.”^[4] (citation via Wikipedia). My base recipe only adds a few strips of bacon to the small chunk of salt pork in the canned beans. Adding the additional pork shoulder would give more bulk to the dish to counter the excess bbq sauce. I’m not sure if I’ll ever bother with coming back to this recipe, but if I do I’ll check out that theory.

Some version of the pork and beans combination has been developed in almost every culture where pork is eaten. It seems to be accepted that the practice spread through Europe with the Romans, although I haven’t done enough research to know what evidence is used to back up this theory. I assume that some variety of beans, pork, and cooking pots were available in other parts of Europe prior to the Roman conquest, so to me it seems more likely that there simply aren’t much in the way of records about what people ate prior to the Romans. I’m skeptical of the idea that such a basic combination has to have had a single origin point and spread from there. I’m sure that Romans helped spread it to places where pork or beans maybe weren’t a part of the diet before, but I’m guessing that such a basic combination would have been discovered independently by anyone with access to both ingredients well before recorded history.

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Sweet and Sticky Pork and Beans

Serves: 6-8
Prep: 20 minuts
Cook 1:40
Total: 2:00