a dishbaked beans

White beans — navy or pea beans — cooked slow in a sweet brown sauce of molasses or brown sugar with pork in it, and served hot in a cup or a compartment of the tray. On a Carolina barbecue plate they usually come from a large can, warmed and doctored at the pit with more sugar, mustard, onion or a handful of chopped barbecue; the traditional form is dried beans parboiled and then baked for hours in a covered pot, and the canned form is cooked through steam rather than baked at all. They belong to the pig pickin' — the outdoor party where guests pull the meat off a whole hog — as much as to the counter.

The dish is North American before it is Southern. Native peoples of the northeast cooked beans with bear fat and maple syrup; British colonists in New England put molasses or brown sugar in place of the syrup and bacon or ham in place of the fat, and simmered the pot over the fire rather than under the ground, and by the nineteenth century each colony had its own bean — navy in Massachusetts, Jacob's Cattle in Maine, yellow-eye in Vermont. Molasses, used from the eighteenth century partly to dodge British sugar duty, is what ties the sweet brown style to Boston. Mrs. A. P. Hill printed a Southern version in 1867 that parboils the beans three times and buries a scored pound of pickled pork in them. What put beans on the barbecue tray was the can: H. J. Heinz began mass canning them in Pennsylvania in 1895, and by the early twentieth century canned beans were among the first convenience foods. Tradition holds — the pit adopted them because a number ten can feeds a crowd and needs no cook. Inference — the sweet-and-smoky seasoning most pits add is a way of making a Northern factory bean taste like it came off the pit.

Dried beans are soaked overnight, parboiled until tender, then baked slowly in a ceramic or cast-iron pot with salt pork, molasses or brown sugar, onion and mustard, until the liquid thickens and the top darkens. The pit version starts from the can: the beans go in a hotel pan with brown sugar, mustard, onion, sometimes ketchup and a scoop of chopped barbecue or the burnt ends of the shoulder, and sit at the back of the pit or in a low oven until the sauce reduces and a skin forms on top. Served hot, in a cup beside the meat or a compartment of the tray.

On the tray at Piedmont pits beside hushpuppies and red slaw. At Brown's Bar-B-Que in Kingstree, South Carolina, a whole-hog plate with bread, baked beans and slaw is the take-out order. Beans, slaw and hushpuppies are the standing list for a pig pickin'.