Texas Beans: A Fast, Tasty, Smoky Bean Delight

One of my favorite activities is searching through old family cookbooks for wonderful dishes that I know my family and I will like. Recently, I was at my mother-in-law's home in St. George, Utah, where I rooted through her old semi-homemade cookbooks.

If you belong to a church or live in a neighborhood or send your kids to a school, you've probably been asked to participate in creating a local cookbook. If you haven't contributed, you've certainly been solicited to buy one of the things. There are companies who do nothing but print these locally-themed, usually plastic-comb-bound cookbooks.

I dearly love these cookbooks. They preserve the treasured family recipes of real people, not the fancified recipes of gourmet cooks, food writers, and others who think all recipes need unusual, trendy ingredients and complex instructions.

Here's one of the fruits (so to speak--no jokes about musical fruit, here, please) of that last search, a recipe attributed to Barbara Bubnick printed in the 1963 cookbook produced by a La Junta, Colorado, church group.

• 2 cups small navy beans (canned beans will work fine)
• 1 small green pepper, diced
• 1 pound ground beef
• 1 teaspoon liquid smoke
• 2 Tablespoons molasses
• 3 Tablespoons fat (bacon grease is great; oil is OK)
• 1 medium onion, diced
• 1/3 cup catsup
• 3 Tablespoons brown sugar
• salt and pepper to taste

Cook the 2 cups of small navy beans. In a skillet, put the fat (or oil), green pepper, onion, and cook until the vegetables are tender. Add the ground beef and cook till the meat is done. Add the catsup, liquid smoke, brown sugar, molasses. Salt and pepper as seems appropriate. Then add the cooked beans and simmer for 1/2 hour OR put it all in a covered casserole and heat in the oven for 30 to 35 minutes. (The original recipe gives no oven temperature, but I would guess 350 degrees would do the job.)

Doesn't that sound good? It has elements of standard baked beans, but adds liquid smoke and hamburger (excuse me, ground beef) to give it a more western flavor. It can be made relatively quickly and doesn't cost much.

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