In Praise of Tinned Beans On Toast

On Saturday mornings when I was a kid, my mother was usually at work, and my father was responsible for making sure we were clothed, fed, and washed. If you met my gregarious father, he might tell you he’s great at making a stir-fry, or perhaps that he drinks a smoothie every day. I suspect he’s stretching the truth; the last time I stayed at his apartment, I nosily discovered a film of dust on the blender and extra-nosily rooted through his pantry, finding a packet of gravy mix that expired two decades ago.

He’d buy us McDonald’s and let us run free in the botanical gardens close to the bridge where he most liked to see trains chug by so he could record their reporting numbers in a little book. But on days when there were Premier League soccer games featuring Manchester United, breakfast was usually beans on toast. Most often Heinz Original Beans in Tomato Sauce, though a frequent substitute was store-brand baked beans in tomato sauce, which were much cheaper. I remember them going for forty-nine cents a can at No Frills in the late ’90s and early 2000s. (These days, they’re over a dollar.)

My dad likes his tinned beans with Worcestershire sauce and other adulterations. I like mine the way they come in the can. My brother doesn’t really like them at all, and often opted for cereal. My dad would heat up two cans in an oblong plastic Tupperware in the microwave, toasting six pieces of bread. One and a half cans and four slices for him; two slices and a half can for me. I disliked margarine, which was what we had at our house, so I had mine on plain toasted bread, letting the beans soak in until the bread had softened from the sauce. Today, my household contains salted butter; even better, the bean sauce mixes with the butter and becomes just a little richer.

In my younger, poorer, not-cooking-for-my-family years, I ate beans on toast with carrot sticks on the side anywhere from one to four times a week. I still eat them today, on toast, and incorporated into a very humble vegetarian version of shepherd’s pie recipe. Full of fibre and protein, they are a cheap, easy meal; if I was asked, on a TV show like Top Chef, to make my “comfort food,” baked beans are the food I would think of first before coming up with something I could actually serve to the judges. I also might be the last person in my family who eats them regularly; my husband and daughter don’t like them, and my brother never did.

I’ve taken their existence for granted my whole life. It’s only in considering their familial demise that I become curious about their history and the way they became a cultural touchstone for us.

Like many iconic British things (tea! chutney!), the story of how baked beans became beloved in the U.K begins elsewhere. Navy beans—a small white bean and a variety of Phaseolus vul- garis, which includes other common beans like pintos, green beans, black beans, and kidney beans, but not soybeans (Glycine max) or scarlet runners (Phaseolus coccineus)—are used to make them. Phaseolus vulgaris is native to what’s currently known as the Americas and was first domesticated over five centuries ago; the bean had been developed into many different varieties and traditionally grown alongside corn and squash in many cultures, before colonizers stepped foot here. Europeans had favas and chickpeas and lentils pretty early, but it wasn’t until the sixteenth century that they got the common bean.

Today, Brits eat more Heinz baked beans than anyone else on the planet. But the dish probably emerged from similar First Nations dishes, which were most likely made with maple syrup and sometimes venison and then adopted by hungry settlers, before being subsumed into industrialized production under Henry John Heinz and the H.J. Heinz Company, which began producing tinned baked beans in 1895 in Pittsburgh.

Tinned baked beans made it to England in 1899, according to one source, and 1901, according to another, initially as a luxury import item. In 1928, the company began producing tinned beans in Harlesden, a district in northwest London; the price came down, and the product gained popularity. It’s unclear when, exactly, the New England–style beans exported from the U.S. changed recipes—but eventually the beans were adapted to suit British tastes, omitting molasses, maple syrup, and brown sugar for a tomato-based sauce.

From 1941 to 1948, tinned beans were rationed on the points system in the U.K., which covered staples like milk, eggs, butter, bacon, and ham. Points rationing was flexible: each person received a certain number of points to use on a variety of essentials, beginning with canned meats, fish, and beans, and later extending to things like biscuits, grains, cheeses, dried eggs, and dried fruits. This is also when the beans lost their pork and became mostly vegetarian—why waste extra ration points?

Today, Heinz Beanz—the U.K. version—are made in a factory in Wigan, in Greater Manchester, that claims the title of largest food processing plant in Europe. The navy beans used to make them are still imported from North America, and the tomatoes for the sauce are mostly grown in Spain and Portugal. The beans are checked for quality and then blanched for rehydration purposes, but the actual cooking process occurs after they’re sealed into the can with the tomatoes and spices. The cans themselves are cooked in high-pressure steam.

Learning about the history of baked beans makes me wish I liked the ones with maple syrup or molasses or even pork. I could spin this off into an exploration of “authenticity” in food, but the truth is that authenticity is complicated and messy, and many foods and recipes are pluralized in a way that is authentic. It’s important to understand relationships of power and colonialism, and the movement of different foods and food cultures through history. But ultimately, tinned beans in tomato sauce are the ones more familiar to me; they’re my comfort food, even if they’re a sloppy-looking hodgepodge of tan and brown that left this place for England only to come back again.

A further complication is that my Canadian taste buds aren’t actually accustomed to Heinz Beanz. Like many things with complicated colonial histories—spellings in English, for example—the Canadian beans I eat are a bit of a North American–British hybrid.

To explore this, I walk up to my local Save-On-Foods and buy two tins of Heinz beans in tomato sauce. The first comes from the British imports section: a turquoise tin reading “Heinz Beanz” on sale for $3.99. On the other side of the aisle are the Canadian beans in tomato sauce for $2.49—my personal standard-bearer. Also in a turquoise tin, but reading “Heinz Beans Original.”

At home, I open the tins (pop top for the U.K. beans, can opener for the Canadian) and arm myself with a fork. The U.K. version tastes more tomatoey. The beans are firmer, and there’s more definition between the beans and the sauce. The Canadian beans are noticeably sweeter, less tomatoey, and just the faintest bit mushier—like the bean starch has leached into the sauce a little more readily.

My taste test confirms that I prefer the sweeter Canadian version. It also makes me reflect on the specific place these beans hold as a staple—mainly because after I have a few forkfuls, I need to decide on how we’ll eat the remainder of the tins.

These days, we mostly eat dried beans. The pandemic solidified my movement towards dry goods and a full, stocked pantry, inspiring me to bulk order 25-kilo sacks of pintos and black beans. The pintos I cook fairly simply, incorporating sautéed garlic, onions, carrot, and green pepper and serving them over rice or polenta, with sour cream and salsa and homemade fermented hot sauce. The black beans we use in anything from veggie burgers to soup to enchiladas. I use the Crock-Pot method, which sometimes calls, depending on the bean, for soaking and boiling for a short period before slowly cooking over the course of the day, the lid rocking gently on the porcelain when it reaches its highest heat, the house filling with the smell of stewed beans.

I cook favas, kidney beans, black-eyed peas, scarlet runners—anything going. And I love these beans. But I usually plan to make them the night before, setting up the dry ingredients in the Crock-Pot and sautéing any precooked elements when I make that night’s dinner. They serve one function, and tinned baked beans serve another.

As a processed food, tinned beans are a cure-all for being both out of money and time. They are—still!—what I make when I’m hungry and tired and penny-pinching, in search of something that will take five minutes to prepare and still satisfy me. They are a cultural hangover from my dad’s side of the family, both of our recent roots in England and a reminder of times when food insecurity was pressing for us, when we worked too much for too little money. But a reminder, too, of the calmer pockets of my childhood, of slow mornings with my dad, and the power of finding comfort where we can.

Excerpted in part from Hearty: On Cooking, Eating, and Growing Food for Pleasure and Subsistence by andrea bennett. Copyright © by andrea bennett, 2024. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com