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Bean Soup

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

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

Cook 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.

Make the soup

  1. Use the cooking water as stock.

  2. Boil the stock with rice.

  3. Add lemon juice or sorrel and salt to taste.

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

  5. Gradually stir the stock into the tureen to create an excellent 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
Provide the main body of the soup and a starchy, creamy texture when cooked soft.
Egg yolk
Enriches the soup and thickens it slightly when stirred into the hot stock.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounder, richer mouthfeel to the soup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Gradually stir the stock into the tureen. Adding hot stock to the egg yolk too quickly can scramble the yolk. Pouring slowly while stirring tempers the yolk so it blends smoothly and thickens the soup without curdling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Pumpkinfits less well

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