This Basic 2-Ingredient Sandwich Is A Vintage New England Staple

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New England is known for clam chowder, perfect lobster rolls, and apple cider donuts. But one of the state's most famous staples is baked beans, which you might know as Boston baked beans. Not only are Boston baked beans a side dish that most of us have enjoyed at backyard barbecues and Sunday picnics, they're also the filling for a vintage sandwich that older New Englanders surely consumed.

A baked bean sandwich has just two ingredients: Baked beans and sandwich bread. A product of the waste-not-want-not attitudes of the early 20th century, baked bean sandwiches first appeared in a New England cookbook entitled "The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book" in 1909 as a way to use up leftover baked beans. The original recipe presses cold baked beans through a colander, blends the beany paste with diced celery, horseradish, and tomato sauce, then spreads the mixture between two slices of buttered and toasted Boston brown bread. Boston canned brown bread is another famous New England staple that, like baked beans, contains molasses and also comes in cans.

In a 1919 cookbook, "Cooking for Two," the recipe is more elaborate, layering baked beans with salad dressing-dipped slices of lettuce and cauliflower florets. Over the following decades, however, baked bean sandwiches have simplified; most New Englanders remember packing white slices of sandwich bread stuffed only with cold baked beans in their school lunch boxes.

If you have leftovers after making a giant pot of these slow cooker baked beans, a sandwich should now be on your repurpose recipe list. And you can upgrade your creation with simple additions. Considering the popularity of beans on toast, a baked bean sandwich could be made even tastier by simply toasting and buttering the sandwich bread you serve it on. Our recipe uses gochujang to complement the sweet ingredients with zingy spice. But if you're using a different recipe or a can of baked beans, you can make a condiment out of gochujang and mayo to slather over the sandwich bread.

You can also add pickled jalapeños or any other pickles, like these sour and tangy slices of Vlasic pickles from Amazon, to counteract the beans' sweetness. Many baked bean recipes contain ham or bacon, making for an even heartier sandwich, but you can always add more crispy bacon or slices of deli meat ham; we ranked Trader Joe's rosemary ham as one of our favorite Trader Joe's deli meats. A fried egg would also be a delicious sandwich topper, and if you added roasted tomatoes and bacon you're halfway to a sandwich version of an English breakfast fry-up.

Another British take on this vintage New England sandwich would be to turn it into a cheese and bean toastie (colloquially known in the U.K. as cheesy beanos when served on toast) by adding shredded cheddar or mozzarella to the beans and toasting the sandwich in a toaster oven or panini press.