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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with soaked black beans, onion, celery, butter, Worcestershire sauce, flour, lemon juice, and sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak black beans overnight in 2 quarts of cold water.

  2. Drain the beans and replace with 2 quarts of fresh water.

  3. Fry half an onion and 4 stalks of celery in 1 tablespoon of butter.

  4. Add the fried vegetables to the beans and boil until tender.

Finish the soup

  1. Pass the mixture through a colander and return to the stove.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

  3. Blend 1 tablespoon of flour with 1 tablespoon of butter and stir in a little lemon juice.

  4. Add this mixture to the soup before serving.

  5. Pour ½ glass of good sherry wine into the tureen 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 thicken it as they cook down and break apart.
Butter
Carries the frying flavour of the onion and celery and enriches the soup.
Flour
Blended with butter, it thickens the soup slightly as it heats.
Sherry wine
Adds a fragrant, acidic depth of flavour stirred in just before serving.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and butter mixture. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps. Blending it with butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, celery, butter, pepper, sauce, flour, 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.

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