Before I move on to the method for making the beans, a quick word on the pork. Traditionally, the cut used is salt pork, which is the salted and cured slab of thick fat that runs along a pig’s back. It adds a deep, pure pork flavor to the beans, but you do need to watch out for two things. First, if you use a piece of salt pork that’s solid fat, with no stripe of muscle at all, you may want to cut the quantity slightly (say, from a half pound down to a third of a pound or so per pound of beans). If you don’t, you can end up with some seriously greasy beans…good if you’re a lumberjack, but not great otherwise.
Second, some salt pork comes with plenty of salt still clinging to it. If yours does, you’ll want to wash the excess off, lest your beans end up oversalted.
If you can’t find salt pork, you can, of course, substitute slab or thick-cut bacon. Since bacon comes from the belly, the cut has a higher ratio of lean muscle to fat than salt pork does. You can stay at a half pound per pound of beans, or you can go wild and bump it up to three-quarters of a pound if you want them extra bacon-y. That’s not such a bad thing, since the bacon adds a smoky flavor that’s probably not too far off from the taste of the beans back when the Pilgrims cooked them in the flickering embers of a dying wood fire.
