Skip to main content
Main

Mee Ss Bean Soup

A simple soup made from navy beans, water, salt, pepper, butter, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mee Ss Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the navy beans overnight.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the beans for about four hours, adding water as needed and stirring often.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Strain the soup through a colander.

  4. Add a small piece of butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with a slice of lemon in the soup plate.

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

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

  3. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 recipes

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

  4. Coffee + beanstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together289 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Navy beans
Provide the main body and starch that thicken the soup as they break down during long boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boil the beans for about four hours. Navy beans must be fully tender before straining; if they are undercooked, the soup stays grainy and the starch will not release to thicken it. Adding water as needed keeps the beans covered so they cook evenly without scorching.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coffee, pepper, butter, lemon):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Cocoafits about as well
  3. Hazelnutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, pepper, butter, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes