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Southern Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with black beans, a soup shank, spices, and served with lemon slices and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Southern Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the beans

  1. Wash the black beans thoroughly and soak them in enough water to cover overnight.

  2. The next morning, do not drain the water; add 3 quarts more and the soup shank.

Cook and season

  1. Cook slowly for 6 hours.

  2. Add cayenne and salt to taste.

  3. One-half hour before it's done, add the ground allspice.

  4. Once cooked, strain the beans and liquid through a colander.

  5. Flavor with a little sherry.

Serve

  1. Serve with thin slices of lemon and hard-boiled eggs in each dish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beans + allspicetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together211 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken the liquid as they break down during long cooking.
Soup shank
Releases savory flavor and richness into the cooking liquid over the long simmer.
Ground allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes that build during the final half hour of cooking.
Sherry
Adds a light, sweet-acidic aroma that brightens the finished soup.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 6 hours. Beans need a long, gentle simmer to become fully tender and to release their starch, which gives the soup body. Boiling hard can break the beans apart unevenly and leave the liquid cloudy or thin.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, allspice, sherry, lemon, egg):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, allspice, sherry, lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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