40 Fun Facts About Baked Beans

Despite the name, canned baked beans are usually not baked at all but cooked by which method?

Steaming does the work: the raw beans and sauce are sealed in the can, then cooked in large pressure cookers, which also thickens the sauce.

A burst tank sent a deadly wave of which Boston baked-bean sweetener through the city's North End in 1919?

Molasses killed 21 people that day, rushing through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour. The harbor ran dark with it until summer.

Which band member sat in a bathtub of Heinz baked beans for the cover of the 1967 album The Who Sell Out?

Roger Daltrey said the beans had come straight from the fridge and that the long, freezing photo shoot left him ill.

The Boston Beaneaters, a 19th-century baseball club named for the city's baked beans, are now which MLB franchise?

Atlanta Braves history began in Boston, where sportswriters called the club the Beaneaters from 1883. The team later moved to Milwaukee and then south to Georgia.

Why did colonial New Englanders bake their beans on Saturday and leave them in the oven overnight?

Sunday cooking was forbidden under Sabbath rules, so beans baked on Saturday stayed hot overnight and gave families a warm meal the next day.

Which upmarket London department store became the first shop in Britain to sell tins of Heinz baked beans?

Fortnum & Mason stocked them as an imported luxury, and Heinz did not start selling its baked beans across the rest of the UK until 1901.

In Bush's Baked Beans commercials, what breed of dog is Duke, who keeps trying to sell the secret family recipe?

Golden retriever Duke joined spokesman Jay Bush on screen in 1995. He was modeled on Jay's real pet, who had stage fright and never played the part himself.

The white beans used for baked beans are native to which part of the world, reaching Europe only in the 16th century?

The Americas gave the world the common bean, which is why a theory that baked beans grew out of older European bean stews is thought unlikely.

Boston Baked Beans, a classic American candy made by Ferrara, are actually which food inside a hard sugar shell?

Peanuts sit inside the candy coating, and the name is only a nod to the dish. The same company makes Lemonheads and Red Hots.

The Beanpot, a Boston tournament named after the pot for baked beans, involves four universities in which sport?

Ice hockey teams from Boston University, Boston College, Harvard and Northeastern meet on the first two Mondays of February, drawing some of the college game's biggest crowds.

The navy bean used in most canned baked beans goes by which name in the United Kingdom?

Haricot bean is the British name. Americans call it the navy bean because the US Navy has served it to sailors as a staple since the mid-1800s.

Which US state passed a law making the baked navy bean its official state bean?

Massachusetts wrote the baked navy bean into its general laws, alongside an official muffin, cookie and dessert. The dessert, fittingly, is Boston cream pie.

The triangular trade made Boston an exporter of which spirit, distilled from the syrup that sweetens its baked beans?

Rum distilling brought so much dark syrup into the port that cooks began stirring it into their beans, creating a style unique to New England.

Baked beans are a popular modern addition to which classic British meal?

Full English breakfast purists object that beans are a modern, non-traditional extra, yet a 2017 YouGov poll found most Britons want them on the plate.

In Britain, baked beans and grated cheddar cheese are among the most common fillings for which oven-cooked staple?

Jacket potato is the British name for a potato baked in its skin, a dish hawked on the streets in autumn and winter as far back as the mid-19th century.

Bush Brothers, the largest producer of canned baked beans in the United States, is based in which state?

Tennessee is where A.J. Bush opened a cannery in the village of Chestnut Hill in 1904. The family firm moved its headquarters to Knoxville in 1991.

Van Camp's pork and beans became a staple after the company won a contract to supply soldiers in which war?

American Civil War contracts to feed Union troops made Gilbert Van Camp's canned beans familiar, and returning veterans kept buying the food they knew.

Stokely-Van Camp, a firm famous for canned pork and beans, bought the rights in the 1960s to make which sports drink?

Gatorade went on to earn more than all of the bean canner's other products combined, and the brand later passed to Quaker Oats and then PepsiCo.

Some historians once traced baked beans to which slow-cooked bean and meat stew from southern France?

Cassoulet is an unlikely ancestor, since the beans used for baked beans reached Europe only around 1528. Colonists may still have borrowed its soaking and simmering steps.

Gigantes plaki, a meze dish of giant white beans baked with olive oil and herbs, comes from which country?

Greece's giant baked beans are really a variety of runner bean, and because the dish is vegan it suits the fast days of the Orthodox calendar.

Which New England loaf, traditionally cooked in a can, is the classic partner for Boston baked beans?

Brown bread gets its color from a mix of cornmeal, rye and whole wheat flours. The batter is poured into a can and cooked in a kettle rather than an oven.

Which sausage is sliced into baked beans in a classic American dish that Van Camp's sells in cans?

Hot dogs take the place of salt pork in beans and franks, which Van Camp's cans as Beanee Weenee. Nobody knows who first paired the two, but the dish has its own national day each July.

Quebec's fèves au lard, a cousin of Boston baked beans, is often sweetened with which ingredient?

Maple syrup flavors the slow-baked beans and bacon, a sugar-shack staple that Quebecers took up through exchanges with New Englanders in the 19th century.

Loggers in which US state kept alive the tradition of bean-hole beans, baked overnight in a pot buried among hot coals?

Maine logging camps served the beans at every meal. A pot was lowered into a stone-lined pit of coals, covered with dirt and left to cook until morning.

B&M baked its beans in open iron pots until 2021 at a landmark waterfront cannery in which New England city?

Portland's cannery, at 1 Beanpot Circle, was a familiar sight for drivers on Interstate 295. After production left, the site was sold to become a Northeastern University campus.

Heinz's Kitt Green plant, one of Europe's largest food factories and home of its baked beans, is in which English town?

Wigan's plant turns out more than a billion cans of food a year, and Queen Elizabeth II visited to mark its 50th anniversary in 2009.

In the 1975 rock opera film Tommy, which actress's character hallucinates rolling around in a flood of baked beans?

Ann-Margret spent a reported three days shooting the scene of foam, beans and chocolate, which director Ken Russell called revenge on TV adverts he once made.

Beano, an enzyme supplement that tames bean gas, earned inventor Alan Kligerman which tongue-in-cheek award in 1991?

Ig Nobel Prize judges honored him in the awards' very first year. His supplement adds an enzyme people lack, breaking down bean sugars before gut bacteria can ferment them.

Beans cause gas because gut bacteria ferment which kind of carbohydrate that human digestion cannot break down?

Oligosaccharides such as raffinose pass through the small intestine untouched, then feed bacteria in the large intestine, which release the gas.

Captain Beany, who paints his head orange and ran a baked bean museum from his flat, comes from which country?

Wales is home to the Port Talbot fundraiser, born Barry Kirk, who set a world record in 1986 by sitting in a bath of baked beans for more than 100 hours.

Unlike sweeter American recipes, the British-style baked beans eaten on toast are canned in a sauce made from what?

Tomato sauce with herbs and spices replaced the sweeter original after Heinz adjusted its recipe to suit British tastes. That version is now the one most eaten outside the United States.

The H. J. Heinz Company, which began mass-canning baked beans in 1895, was long based in which Pennsylvania city?

Pittsburgh was the firm's home for well over a century. Founder Henry J. Heinz started out nearby in 1869, bottling horseradish long before he canned a bean.

Heinz topped which frozen food with baked beans for British shoppers in the 1990s, then brought the idea back in 2022?

Pizza with a baked bean topping was first sold commercially as the Heinz Beanz Pizza, a frozen line that vanished for years before its revival.

Britain's advertising watchdog banned a 2016 Heinz advert because it showed people using empty bean cans as what?

Musical instruments made from empty cans were judged a safety risk by the Advertising Standards Authority, which banned the campaign.

Which US agency has long held that shoppers understand canned 'pork and beans' to contain very little pork?

FDA officials called 'pork and beans' the usual name for a product with very little pork, typically just one piece of salt pork that adds fat to the can.

During wartime rationing, Britain's government classed Heinz baked beans as which kind of food from 1941 to 1948?

Essential food was the Ministry of Food's label for the beans for seven years, a striking rise for a product first sold in Britain as an expensive novelty.

Canned baked beans are a rich source of which mineral, supplying about a fifth of the daily requirement per 100 grams?

Zinc stands out on the label at 21 percent of the reference daily intake, while the beans themselves are 72 percent water and contain almost no fat.

Which Queensland town, a grower of navy beans for US troops in World War II, is called Australia's Baked Bean Capital?

Kingaroy farmers planted the crop from 1940 with seed supplied by the US Army, and every wartime harvest was grown under government contract.

On which Channel Island did bakers once let residents slow-cook a traditional bean jar in their ovens overnight?

Guernsey families collected the pot in time for their morning meal, a custom common until the 1920s. The dish is still served at an annual National Trust festival.

Tavče gravče, beans baked in an unglazed earthenware pot, is considered the national dish of which European country?

North Macedonia's cooks change the soaking and boiling water several times, which leaches out some of the sugars that make beans gassy.