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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked black beans, stock, spices, and finished with a brown butter‑flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight in 3 quarts of cold water.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and add 3 quarts of fresh water.

  3. Boil gently for 3 hours until there is over a quart of liquid.

Make the soup

  1. Add the stock, cloves, allspice, onion, mace, cinnamon, celery, and bay leaf.

  2. In a frying pan, melt the butter and add the flour; cook until brown.

  3. Stir the browned mixture into the soup and simmer for nearly an hour.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, then strain through a fine sieve.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of lemon and hard boiled eggs.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Allspice + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,422 recipes

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

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 it as they break down during long boiling.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and a toasted, nutty flavor when browned.
Flour
Browned in butter to form a roux that thickens the soup.
Stock
Supplies the main savory liquid base of the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter until brown. Flour must be cooked long enough to lose its raw starch taste and brown evenly; under-browned roux leaves a pasty flavor, while over-browned roux turns bitter and darkens the soup.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, clove, allspice, onion, cinnamon, celery, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, clove, allspice, onion, cinnamon, celery, butter. 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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