Looks yum! Wish I was there :-)

Just for the record, I would call those borlotti beans, although apparently they are also known as cranberry beans. I do rather like “October beans” though ;-)

Home grown beans and home grown meat....it was that bean pot that made them what they are!!
I saw the handwriting on the wall some years ago....and saved a couple of coffee cans until they got nasty.....
What's your recipe for brown bread? It looks lighter than the stuff in the can ( which is what I am used to).

Looks good! I have to try to adapt that method for my crockpotless kitchen. The idea of making it in jars is a good one. A whole bowl of steamed bread takes hours and hours to steam.

Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and gardeners call those "birdy-egg beans." And they are the borlotti in Italian recipes, also called cranberry beans.

P.S. I looked up the recipe and I see it takes as along, or almost as long, as steaming on the stove, even though it's in jars. I guess the slow cooker keeps the water below boiling. So then how does the bread steam........?

Annie, thanks for sharing your photos and story. I love baked beans and brown bread. That was a typical Saturday supper of my childhood (except in warm weather). Sometimes we'd make cornbread and have that with the beans. We'd usually bake pea, red kidney or Jacob's Cattle beans. My father was the Saturday morning bean master. He'd put lean-ish salt pork, onion (halved) and a sauce he concocted from brown sugar, catsup, dry mustard, bay leaf, Heinz 57, horseradish, and water. I've been advised not to eat saturated fats, and to limit sodium and sugar. So there goes Dad's bean recipe for me.

He always soaked the beans the preceding night, and would parboil them before putting into the pot. The water was discarded each time.

Nothing beats entering the house in late afternoon on a winter day and being met with that promising aroma of a delicious baked bean dinner.

Now your photos have left me craving home baked beans. Maybe soon! I have a large, solid very old ironstone bean pot that bought 50 years ago at a country junk and 'antique' shop.

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Colleen, I first started growing those beans because I got a free package of something that was labelled "Italian Horticultural". I planted them and when they were ready to be "shucked", Elery excitedly proclaimed that I had successfully grown "October" beans, called that because in Tennessee they were ready for harvest about the first of October. Mother saw a bowl full of them and proclaimed them to be cranberry beans, LOL. So, borlotti, huh? It's amazing how many names those beans have, and that everyone who sees them is familiar with them, but calls them something else! Elery was so pleased that I saved seeds for the next year's planting, and I've been planting and growing them ever since. We just shell them out and put them into freezer bags, they cook so much more quickly than they do if we dry them.

LindaC, that old bean pot sure does the job that it's meant to do. I could make baked beans in one of my Pyrex casseroles or the cast iron dutch oven, but the bean pot just seems "right", you know?

CC, my old recipes for steamed breads all call for the cans to be covered with foil. I think this does the same thing, as the lids are just put on enough to hold them there, they aren't tightened down. I know some people put their canning jars in the oven, although the manufacturer says not to, but they go into boiling water and into the pressure canner, I can't imagine that they wouldn't withstand the steaming on stovetop or in the oven.

petalique, I've always loved baked beans. When there were leftovers at home, I'd have them for breakfast, stuffed into a hot dog bun or spread on a piece of bread which was then folded over and greedily consumed. I could leave out the smoked meat and they'd still be good, but I don't know how I could sub the molasses and still get that flavor. I'd hate to mess up the recipe, it would have to become an occasional treat, I suppose, a splurge on a day when I ate nothing else bad for me. How is it that what we love becomes bad for us? (sigh)

I did make the bread without gluten, for my celiac daughter. I used buckwheat flour in place of the rye, kept the cornmeal, and used a gluten free flour blend in place of the whole wheat. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was still darned good.

Annie