These Chili Beans have a little bit of everything … definitely a main dish. Spicy and hot if you are into it. OR the dish can be tamed. It’s up to you. This recipe is easy but does take time to cook to bring out the flavors. After the first few steps it can be cooked in a crockpot if you have one large enough. This recipe tends to grow. I suggest an eight quart stock pot just to provide even heating and easy stirring … no worry of spilling over.
Eating habits have changed over the years. And so have many old recipes. We are more conscious of the nutritional value of what we eat. We scrutinize ingredients. We change up recipes adding good ingredients and eliminating the bad. One of the ingredients we now change out is vegetable shortening, substituting vegetable cooking oil or butter. Vegetable shortening has had a facelift, too, however. Crisco, for one, changed their almost 100 year old formula to remain in the competition. Trans fats have been eliminated. But still we gravitate to the oil and butter. What really competes well with the taste of butter!
Old cake recipes most often use shortening as the fat ingredient. Substituting oil or butter for the shortening can be tricky. The texture of the cake changes and often times not for the better. There are just some cake recipe ingredients better left alone. This Peanut Butter Cake’s ingredients are from the 1950 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book with slight variation. I’ve just simply made this a quick one bowl mix.
Grandmother’s Lowell Massachusetts Baked Beans were often served as a side with vinho d’ alhos. An amazingly rich Baked Bean recipe!