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Bean Soup

A soup made from soaked white beans, vegetables, and stock, finished with egg yolk, butter, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and sorrel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Boil the soaked beans in a sufficient quantity of water with the carrot, turnip, onion, and salt until soft.

  2. Strain off the water.

  3. Serve the beans as a vegetable or save for bean puree the next day.

Make the soup

  1. Use the strained water as stock.

  2. Boil the stock with rice.

  3. Add a squeeze of lemon or boiled sorrel.

  4. Add salt to taste.

  5. In a tureen, place the egg yolk and butter.

  6. Gradually stir the contents of the saucepan into the tureen to prepare the soup.

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. Turnip + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

  5. Beans + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

White beans
Form the body of the soup and the puree saved for later.
Egg yolk
Enriches the soup and gives it a smooth, thickened texture when stirred in.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the soup.
Rice
Adds body and starch to the stock as it boils.

The step that matters

Gradually stir the contents of the saucepan into the tureen. Egg yolk can curdle if hot liquid hits it all at once. Adding the hot liquid slowly while stirring gently warms the yolk so the soup stays smooth and thickened.

Swap the sorrel

The recipe marks sorrel as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, turnip, onion, egg, butter, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sorrelthe original
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, onion, egg, 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.

More bean soup recipes

Black 138Haricot 45White 36Baked 31Turtle 22Lima 16 See all 179 →

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