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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup of black beans, veal, and spices, served with sliced eggs and lemon, finished with wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

  2. In the morning, place the soaked beans and knuckle of veal in a pot with water and boil for four hours.

  3. Remove the liquid and strain it.

  4. Pick off a few shreds of veal and return them to the pot.

  5. Thicken the soup with brown flour.

  6. Add ground spices to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the sliced hard-boiled eggs and lemon slices in a tureen.

  2. Pour the soup over the layers.

  3. Add the wine to the tureen.

  4. Serve.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  5. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

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 break down during long boiling.
Knuckle of veal
Adds savory, gelatin-rich flavor and body to the broth during the long simmer.
Brown flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with brown flour. Flour must be fully incorporated and heated so its starch swells smoothly; added as dry lumps or left unheated, it leaves a gritty texture and raw floury taste.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (coffee, veal, flour, allspice, pepper, clove, egg):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, veal, flour, allspice, pepper, clove, egg. 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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