Did she pre-soak and pre-cook the beans?

I seem to recall that there's something about adding salt before the beans have softened that makes them hard, which the bacon and sauces may have added. My Mom did this once for Christmas dinner, which ended up tasting like almonds in tomato sauce :-P

The tomatoes in the Ketchup?

Yes....the acid in the ketchup from the vinegar and tomatoes....and plus that the molasses and brown sugar are acedic. Beans won't get soft in an acedic broth....and if your beans are not getting tender, add a pinch of baking soda.
She would have been fine if she had left out the ketchup and the mustard until the beans were tender.

LOL I've never had an issue with hard beans. I never soak I just rinse and bake them low and slow but then again other than brown sugar and molasses, I don't add acidic foods to the recipe. On the flip side, I have made mushy beans before. One year I pre-soaked the beans in water with a 1/4 tsp of baking soda. Those were mushy baked beans and they were worse after being frozen. I ended up making refried beans out of the baked kidney beans.

Also, don't forget the vinegar in prepared mustard. All those acidic ingredients worked against the hours of cooking. Just curious: Would the addition of some baking soda made any difference with all those other ingredients? Or would the beans still have remained hard? Just wondering if baking soda could have been used as a corrective after the beans had cooked for a while.

I think that if you had added enough soda to the beans to counteract all the acedity, you would have ended up with beans that tasted like an Alka Seltzer!
We just said, we are not serving them and we are not mixing them in with the beans that are well cooked....and she left in a snit reminding us all that she had gone to school for 6 years and was a registered dietitician....then later emailed all of us and said how delicious her beans were, nice and firm with a satisfyiing bite.
And a couple of weeks later she was back and I was asking her "please drain the pickles before you add them to the egg salad....and she was reminding me that she liked pickle juice in egg salad....and I said but this is my recipe. Didn't mention what all the juice in the jar would have done to the texture of the egg salad!

I used to work in a restaurant where we had a Home Ec teacher working as a kitchen hand- nice person but very slow and not great as a kitchen hand. Just didn't get that a busy restaurant kitchen is not like pottering around at home. Another Home Ec teacher (who was co-owner of a restaurant I worked in) had some really weird ideas and gaps in her knowledge- like that when bechamel is cold, it thickens up but will get runny again when you reheat it.

I just did that with some freshly shelled horticultural beans. I'd not do it with dried beans, but thought I'd be OK with fresh beans. I was wrong. Well, kind of. I added the tomato paste, the molasses, mustard, brown sugar, etc. Usually the fresh beans cook in an hour, two at the most. These cooked for 6 hours. Still hard. Cooked 4 more hours. Softer, but not ready yet. 2 more hours and they were finally soft enough to be edible.

I never soak beans, I just dump them into the crock pot, add water, onion, carrot, celery, maybe ham bone or smoked pork hock. Cook them for 9 or 10 hours on high and they're perfect for me. I guess if I'm making baked beans from 'scratch', I'm going to have to soak/pre-cook the beans, or use leftover beans like Grandma always did. In retrospect, that's probably why she always made "extra" beans for baked beans a couple of days later, and I always thought it was just because I loved baked beans. :-)

I just canned my own baked beans with those fresh horticultural beans, a 2 minute boil, 45 minute soak and then add the sauce, pressure can for 65 minutes and they are perfect...

Annie

No need to soak the beans when making baked beans from scratch....just don't add anything acedic...no ketchup nor tomatoes not prepared mustard.
Sugar, molasses, onion are all ok.

A proper bechamel sauce made with a roux and milk will thicken up when cold and thin out when heated again.

Yes, junco, I know that, but my Home Ec teacher boss didn't seem to.

Oh, I see. Thought you meant the opposite!