So for this week’s retro dish, I was feeling lazy. I asked Buzz to “take a look through my bookmarks and find something that looks easy and edible.”
He Googled around and came up with something… well, I guess it does look easy…
BAKED BEANS ALOHA
4 cups (2 1-lb. cans) baked beans
1 12-oz. can luncheon meat, cut in cubes
1 1/3 cups (13 1/2-oz. can) drained pineapple chunks
3/4 cup Kraft Barbecue SauceCombine ingredients in 2-quart casserole. Bake at 350°, 1 hour. 6 to 8 servings
Uh, ok. Spam and pineapple are both fairly reminiscent of Hawaii… so maybe this will work?
We bought Turkey Spam (or, as we’ve nicknamed it, “Spurkey”) instead of Ham Spam. We tend to do this with canned luncheon meat, because it lets us pretend that Spurkey is a healthier option than Spam.
It looks exactly like Spam once it’s cubed, of course. It looks exactly like terrifying when it’s in a bowl with sauce, pineapple, and baked beans.
I really like this baking dish. I’m going to talk about the baking dish instead of what’s in it.
It’s a Le Creuset stoneware dish that I somehow got for only a few dollars, on sale. Pretty, sturdy, colorful…
Oh, look, it’s all finished cooking! Yay!
Overall, this was barely acceptable. The pineapple was perhaps the worst part, with the Spurkey coming in a close second — they just got in the way of the baked beans. (I’ll note that fresh pineapple might be a better addition to the dish than canned, which tends to taste sort of diluted. However, then I’d be proposing we sacrifice a perfectly good pineapple to this highly questionable bean thing.) The barbecue sauce tried to blend everything together, and it did improve the flavor — slightly. It went well with some grilled cheese sandwiches, since you could occasionally stop eating the aloha beans and focus on tasty grilled cheese instead.
But hey… it was an easy meal.
We couldn’t stop laughing when we came across this on Recipe Curio. It just had to be made.
Retro Recipe Attempts 
I love pineapple in my beans!! My mom and my grandma (and I think my great grandma too) put pineapple tidbits in their baked beans. My mom sometimes threw in a little turkey bacon. To me, that’s the best way to eat ’em!! My husband doesn’t like fruit mixed with savory things, so I never make them. Shame I’m breaking tradition, haha. 🙂
By: Joanna on April 22, 2014
at 1:50 pm
I remember that Kraft BBQ sauce bottle (even though we always bought the “jug” brand because it came in a plastic jug, which was somehow better?) and would guess this card was from the late 60’s, early 70’s.
So the pineapple is just there to cut through the salt? Seems like people kept looking for innovative ways to use pineapple which is strange because it was expensive. Maybe not as great a luxury item as a fresh one, but enough that we didn’t waste it in baked beans or Watergate salad.
By: Eat The Blog on April 23, 2014
at 12:40 am
Substitute luncheon meat with 1 dozen wieners.
By: Maria Romano on October 15, 2019
at 8:33 pm