English Beans

I have simplified this recipe by using canned (already cooked) beans, but you could certainly use dried navy beans, soaking or partially cooking them before proceeding with the recipe. In England and much of Britain, beans are served as part of breakfast, and very much so for an "English Breakfast," * although not exclusively so, and serving beans on toast is popular. There are many recipes for English beans, but I've seen perhaps as many as 20 recipes, and with one exception, the one common thing was, no meat was included. In the United States, it is rare to see beans fixed without meat, usually bacon, salt pork or ham, and even the commercial canned versions have meat, although you may need to use a magnifying glass to find it. In Britain, to save time, Heinz canned beans are highly common. These are not the same as the Heinz versions in the U.S., but rather a meatless, mixed sweet and tangy, tomato-y dish, which sell quite well throughout Britain, and "seem" to be sort of a standard by which breakfast beans are judged by many there. When I've had the Heinz variety, ** I've only seen the tomato sauce, no bits of onion or any other ingredient, and while I read where one person mentioned vinegar in the Heinz version, the ingredient list does not mention it, nor is there really any taste of vinegar; at least, not that I could tell. Anyway, this is my version of "English beans," with very tomato-y sauce.

Ingredients:

1 15 ounce can navy beans
1 15 ounce can tomato sauce
2 heaping tablespoons of finely chopped onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 to 2 teaspoons canola oil
2 sprigs fresh thyme
1 teaspoon blackstrap molasses
2 tablespoons brown sugar (I use dark brown sugar, you may need more or less sugar, depending upon the tartness of the tomato sauce you use)

In a medium sauce pan, heat the oil and then saute the onion over medium low heat. After about one minute, add the garlic, cooking the two ingredients until softened. Add the tomato sauce, the thyme, and the blackstrap molasses, stirring to mix everything. Let the sauce simmer lightly for about 20 minutes or more, putting the lid on askew, to keep the sauce from spattering all over your stove, but also allowing the sauce to cook down somewhat. Taste the sauce to see how tangy it is, then add the brown sugar accordingly, stirring well. Let the sauce reduce to thicken it, before adding the beans. After adding the beans, let everything simmer an additional 10 to 15 minutes. The sauce should be well thickened and somewhat sweetened, but not too sweet. It should have a slight tang.

* This is the link to my "English Breakfast" article:  http://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2016/09/an-english-breakfast.html 

** You can often find them in supermarkets nowadays, in the international section, and they have a different label (sort of blue-green? aqua? and the Heinz logo) and the can will have, "Product of the United Kingdom," somewhere on it.    

I put my English beans on toast

WORD HISTORY:
Molasses-This word for, "the syrupy product made from refining sugar," and distantly related to the "mil" part of the word "mildew," goes back to Indo European "melit/melid," which meant "honey." This gave its Latin offspring, "mel," with the same meaning, but also the more general, "sweetness." This then gave Latin, "mellaceus," which meant, "sweet like honey." This gave the Latin-based languages in the Iberian Peninsula forms like, Spanish "melaza," Catalan "melassa," and Galician and Portuguese "melaço," all of which were applied to the refined sugar product originally made in the West Indies from sugar cane there and used to make rum. English borrowed the word from Portuguese probably in the mid 1500s, although the word did not become more common until the late 1500s.