Set wire rack on a sheet pan. Place milk in a shallow dish. Place flour in another shallow dish. Place bread crumbs in third shallow dish. Working one at a time, dip cutlets in milk, then dredge in flour, shaking off excess. Return to milk, then dredge in bread crumbs, pressing to adhere. Place breaded cutlets on a baking sheet.

Heat about 1/2 inch oil in a cast-iron skillet to 375°F. Working in batches and adding oil as needed to maintain level, fry cutlets, turning once, until golden brown on both sides, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer to a clean paper-towel-lined baking sheet. Season with salt and pepper when still hot.

Spread avocado on bottom bun halves. Top with fried cutlets. Mound half of the cheese on the cutlets.

Arrange onion rings on top of cheese. If using chipotles, tear into pieces and arrange on onion rings; alternatively, arrange pickled jalapeños on top of onion rings. Top with papalo and mound the remaining cheese on top. Drizzle with olive oil.

Scoop some bread from each of the top buns and discard. Close sandwiches and serve right away.

Pulling some bread from the top buns helps make a slightly more compact (though still gloriously overstuffed) sandwich.
Pulling the cheese into hair-thin strands creates a texture in each bite that can’t be beat. Cemita buns, papalo, and Queso Oaxaca can be found at well-stocked Mexican and Latin American bakeries and grocers.
Cemitas are a Mexican sandwich that originally hails from the State of Puebla and gets its name from the bun itself, also known as a cemita. This recipe shows you how to make a Pueblan-style cemita with a fried milanesa beef, chicken, or pork cutlet filling. Loaded with fine strands of shredded Oaxacan cheese, plenty of ripe avocado, chipotles or pickled jalapeños, and papalo, a fragrant Mexican herb with a flavor all its own, it’s a masterpiece of sandwich construction.

Cemita buns, papalo, and Queso Oaxaca can be found at well-stocked Mexican and Latin American bakeries and grocers. Queso Oaxaca should be shredded by hand into very thin strands, just like string cheese.

Beans, and baked beans in particular, have been a staple throughout New England since the time of the Pilgrims, not to mention in the rest of the colonies and the world beyond. In Tuscany, they eat fagioli al fiasco; in Languedoc, it’s cassoulet; in Portugal and its former colonies, feijoada. And yet, somehow, Boston got singled out with the nickname “Beantown”* for its love of the local version of the dish. (Although, to be fair, one Italian nickname for a Tuscan is mangiafagioli, or “bean-eater,” so there’s that.) A name that no true Bostonian would ever self-apply.

What are Boston baked beans? The short answer is that they’re small white beans (usually navy beans), slow-cooked in an oven, hearth, or ember-filled hole in the ground with molasses, salt pork, black pepper, and maybe a touch of mustard and onion until they form a thick stew, rich with a deep color and caramelized crust. Those are the ingredients my 1939 copy of The New England Yankee Cookbook calls for; it’s what my 1914 copy of Household Discoveries & Mrs. Curtis’s Cook Book describes; and it’s what The Fannie Farmer Cookbook instructs as well (along with adding a couple of tablespoons of sugar).

The long answer, though, is that it can be difficult to fully differentiate them from other baked beans of colonial New England, including the famed baked beans of Maine.

Some say Maine’s beans are made with a higher ratio of salt pork, while my copy of American Food: The Gastronomic Story quotes a Lewiston, Maine, newspaper as saying that the biggest difference is that Maine’s baked beans are cooked just enough to tenderize the beans, but not so much that they melt down into a thick sauce. “They never wholly assimilate or mash…in Maine. You do get in Boston a sort of brown paste with small nubbly particles in it, dejected in appearance. It should be called ‘bean butter.'”

That’s a little harsh, and, since none of the other recipes I read advise cooking Boston baked beans to the point of making a paste, I think it’s safe to assume that, fed by a bit of regional competitiveness, that Maine newspaper was exaggerating just a little. Still, if we’re willing to allow that there might be a grain of truth to the quote, it can help explain a few things about some of the Boston baked bean recipes out there today.

4 (6-ounce) pieces beef, pork, or chicken cutlets, very thinly pounded
1 cup milk
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup bread crumbs
Canola or vegetable oil, for frying
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 ripe medium Hass avocados, halved, pitted, and sliced
4 homemade or store-bought cemita buns (see note), sesame-seed buns, or brioche buns, halved
2 cups shredded Queso Oaxaca from 1 (14-ounce) ball of cheese (see note), or fresh mozzarella or string cheese, divided
12 raw onion rings (about 1/4 inch thick)
4 chioptle chiles from 1 (7-ounce) can whole chipotle chiles in adobo, or pickled jalapeños from 1 (12-ounce) can
20 leaves papalo (see note), or fresh cilantro leaves
Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling

See, the thing with beans cooked in molasses is that they tenderize very, very slowly (more on this later). Even after leaving them for hours in the oven, you can end up with individual beans floating in a thin broth. But Boston baked beans should, at the very least, be coated in a thickened, glaze-like sauce. Some recipes resort to adding tomato paste or ketchup to thicken the broth, and I’ll admit that, in the process of testing this recipe, I considered doing that more than a couple of times myself.

In the end, I decided to stick firm to tradition and find a way to get my beans soft and my sauce thick without relying on modern add-ins. That meant a baked bean recipe with nothing but beans, molasses, pork, onion, and mustard (and, okay, a couple of aromatics).

When colonists first observed northeastern Native Americans preparing baked beans, what they likely saw being poured into the bean pot was maple syrup, which resulted in a calorie- and protein-rich meal that could warm stomachs and provide needed sustenance through the brutal winter months. In some parts, like Vermont, maple syrup is still used today. But with the Atlantic slave trade and, more specifically, the triangular trade that circulated enslaved Africans along with goods like sugarcane and rum throughout the Atlantic, the town of Boston was awash in molasses, and so, too, were its beans.

Quite literally: In 1919, a massive molasses storage container ruptured in Boston’s North End, with 21 people and several horses killed by the flood…which was apparently not quite as slow as molasses.

The thing with molasses, though, is that it significantly slows down the rate at which beans soften during cooking. First, the slightly acidic pH of molasses, according to Harold McGee, makes the pectins and hemicellulose in the beans’ cell walls more stable and less prone to dissolving; second, the sugar in the molasses strengthens the beans’ cell walls and slows down the rate at which their starch absorbs water; and, finally, the calcium in molasses steps in to further strengthen the beans’ cell walls.

Back in the day, when masonry ovens retained plenty of heat throughout the night, this was a great perk: You could throw a pot of beans in the oven (or in an earthen hole, if you were cooking outdoors) in the evening and open it in the morning to find something that wasn’t mush. Today, though, the molasses creates a minor challenge. Either we follow in our forebears’ footsteps by sticking a pot of beans in the oven overnight, or we need some kind of trick to cut the cooking time slightly.

But there are some drawbacks to this method. First, it takes a damned long time. And second, you have to feel comfortable going to bed with your oven on, which you may not for fire safety reasons. (Frankly, I’m not sure I should even recommend it, for liability reasons.) A slow cooker might solve this overnight problem, but without the all-around dry heat of an oven, it wouldn’t allow for much of the critically important evaporation and surface browning.