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Soup

Baked Bean Soup

A soup made from cold baked beans, water, canned tomatoes, salt, pepper, and dry mustard.

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

Baked Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Add twice the quantity of cold water to the cold baked beans and boil gently until soft.

  2. When the beans are nearly done, add four times as much canned tomatoes as beans.

Strain and season

  1. Rub the mixture through a strainer.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and a little dry mustard stirred into the salt.

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. Beans + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Baked beans
Break down into starch and soft pulp that thickens the soup and gives it body.
Canned tomatoes
Add acidity, color, and bright flavor that balance the sweetness of the beans.
Dry mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent aroma that lifts the flavor of the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the tomatoes near the end. Acid in tomatoes slows the softening of beans, so adding them only when the beans are nearly done keeps the beans tender enough to pass through the strainer smoothly.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, tomato, 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.

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