Ode to Baked Beans

I've just joined the Rancho Gordo Bean Club, and with that subscription comes the right to participate in the related Facebook group. Every day recipes are shared, cooking methods and vessels debated, and the glories of beans depicted.
A few days ago a woman posted a snapshot of a bean pot she'd found at a yard sale. "Is this okay to cook in,"she asked. It seems that a previous owner had messed with it, gluing felt on the underside of the lid, but otherwise it looked just fine, a large (four pound capacity) pot for baking beans in the oven.
One commenter mentioned that New England baked beans are always made with the lid off, with the cook adding a little water periodically over the hours of baking.
"What?!?," I thought. Whoever heard of that? You use the cover, but as they fit loosely you do need to check and add to the liquid from time to time. My reply to her was more polite than that, of course.
She then cited a cookbook that for her is canonical. I looked up the book and found the author was a journalist, not a cook, which left me with only one reply. "I'm chuckling as I read this. My New England Cookbook was my grandmother, born in 1890 and baking a pot of beans every Saturday for most of her adult life."

Our family bean pot now resides with my nephew Kevin, who from time to time cooks up a pot of beans in the true New England manner. Beans, salt pork (not bacon), onion, Colman's mustard, molasses, and white sugar. Gram usually baked pea (also called navy) beans, but later my Aunt Margaret produced the best results ever - hulking, meaty and sweet - with Maine yellow-eye beans.

I remember women bringing huge pots and cookers of beans to the summer fair at First Parish Church in Duxbury. I always helped my mother at the food table, of course. We would sell the beans by the pint, ladling them into the cardboard containers used for hand-packed ice cream. Margaret's recipe always sold out first. One year the new minister's wife brought her beans, but there was much whispering about the fact that they contained TOMATO. How, growing up on the back side of Beacon Hill, did she not know better!

Since abandoning meat as a dietary essential, I have tried to bake beans that taste good without the salt pork. For a while I was adding a nice big dollop of mango chutney to the pot. This helped some, but also redoubled the sweetness. Now that I am paying attention to the added sugar in my diet, the idea of the many forms of sucrose in the recipe is cloying. So I'm going to set out on an experimental journey, with less molasses and no other sugars, but adding something to boost the umami without obviously making a diversion from the New England route of bean cookery. Three contenders are Worcestershire sauce (I do eat little oily fish), smoked paprika, and tamari. Stay tuned for the reviews.