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Two old-fashioned dishes with modern appeal: Boston baked beans and chicken and dumplings.
The beauty of many old-fashioned dishes is that they defy being simplified. These dishes often beg to be prepared on the weekend, when life slows down a bit, which is all the better for enjoying them. Take chicken and dumplings. A Sunday dinner dish popular in the South, this American classic can be as idiosyncratic to prepare as pie dough, but its rewards, as is the case with tender flaky pie crust, are well worth the effort. We did not seek to streamline this dish, but rather to foolproof it--after the time and effort involved, there would be no room for error resulting in leaden dumplings or lackluster chicken and broth.
Baked beans are another case. Sure, you can buy baked beans in a can, but in both flavor and texture they are not comparable to the slow-cooked version you can make yourself. The choices of recipes are staggering, and many left us with overly sweet versions that yielded mushy or, worse, undercooked beans. Again, if we were rolling up our sleeves to prepare this dish, we wanted guarantees of its success.
In developing these dishes, we found that neither requires fancy ingredients or expensive equipment, just a little time and effort. It may be an old-fashioned notion, but we can't agree more that simpler is often best.
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