Recipe - Maple Syrup Rum Baked Beans

4 cup Dried navy beans
12 cup Cold water
1 teaspoon Soda
1 pound Fat & lean salt pork; cut or sliced up
1 lg Onion
1 teaspoon Dry mustard
1 cup Maple syrup
1 tablespoon Coarse salt
4 Cored apples; unpeeled
1 cup Maple or light brown sugar
One half cup Butter
One half cup Rum; optional

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

Cover the beans with 12 cups cold water. Let soak overnight. In the morning
pour the whole thing in a large saucepan. Add 1 tsp soda and more cold
water to cover the beans if necessary. Bring to a boil, uncovered, then
boil until some of the skins come off when you blow on the beans.

Line a bean pot with the cut or sliced up pork, then pour in the beans and their
water. Roll the onion in the dry mustard until all of the mustard sticks to
it, then bury it in the middle of the beans. Pour the maple syrup and
coarse salt on top.

Bake 45 hours in your preheated oven. In the last hour of cooking, cover
the beans with whole apples, placed as close together as possible. Cream
together the sugar and butter, then spread the mixture on top of the
apples. This forms a most delicious topping when the beans are baked. Pour
the rum on top just before serving.

NOTES : This is one of my family recipes. I have never seen the apple cover
in any cookbook, and have no idea where my mother got the idea maybe it
was her own. These are very, very good beans.
Recipe by: The Canadiana Cookbook/Mme Jehane Benoit/1970 Posted to TNT
Prodigy's Recipe Exchange Newsletter by Bill & Leilani Devries
devriesb@cyberbeach.net on Aug 24, 1997