Skip to main content
Main

Bean Soup

A soup made with beans or peas, tomatoes, onions, butter, flour, stock, parsley, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Use leftover beans from dinner.

  2. Cook the tomatoes, stock, parsley, and beans until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Cook the onions in butter until golden brown, then add the flour.

  2. Strain the tomatoes and beans through a sieve, pushing all the pulp through and discarding the skins and seeds.

  3. Reheat the mixture, and when steaming, add the onion, butter, and flour mixture.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste before serving.

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. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 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

Beans or peas
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down into the pulp.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and body, and their pulp gives the soup its color and flavor.
Butter
Carries the onion flavor and helps the onion brown for a richer taste.
Flour
Cooked with the butter and onion, it thickens the soup as it is added at the end.

The step that matters

Cook the onions in butter until golden brown, then add the flour. Browning the onions builds sweet, savory flavor, while cooking the flour briefly in the butter prevents raw starch taste and lumps when it is stirred into the hot soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, parsley, tomato, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, parsley, tomato, butter, flour, pepper. 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.

More bean soup recipes

Black 138Haricot 45White 36Baked 31Turtle 22Lima 16 See all 179 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes