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BLacKk Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked black beans, beef bones or pork, simmered with water and seasoned with salt, pepper, cloves, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

BLacKk Bean Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

Cook

  1. Combine the soaked beans, beef bones or pork, and water in a pot.

  2. Boil for 3 to 4 hours, then strain the mixture.

Season and serve

  1. Season the soup with salt, pepper, cloves, and lemon juice.

  2. Serve with thin slices of lemon, hard-boiled eggs, and diced toasted bread.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 give it its earthy flavour and thickness once strained.
Beef bones or lean salt pork
Add savoury depth and richness to the cooking liquid as it simmers for hours.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the soup and balances its rich, earthy flavour.

The step that matters

Boil for 3 to 4 hours. A long, steady simmer is needed to soften the beans fully and draw flavour from the bones or pork. A hard rolling boil can break the beans apart and cloud the broth, so keep it at a gentle simmer.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, beef, pepper, lemon, egg, bread):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, beef, pepper, lemon, egg, bread. 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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