Skip to main content
Main

Black Bean Puree

A puree of black beans, onion, garlic, butter, flour, and spices, served with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Black Bean Puree

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash the beans and soak them overnight.

Cook and sieve

  1. Simmer the beans in hot water until soft, about 3 to 4 hours.

  2. In the last hour of cooking, add the onion with cloves.

  3. Once soft, rub the mixture through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Bind the puree with flour and butter.

  2. Place the lemon slices in a tureen and strain the soup through them.

  3. Grate the hard-cooked egg on top just 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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  2. Beans + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together908 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Form the main body of the puree and thicken it when rubbed through a sieve.
Flour
Thickens the puree by binding it with butter into a smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the bound puree.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and flavour to the beans as they simmer.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a sieve. Pushing cooked beans through a sieve breaks down their cell walls and skins, giving a smooth puree; leftover skins or lumps spoil the texture.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sauce, onion, butter, flour, egg, lemon):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sauce, onion, butter, flour, egg, 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