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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked black beans, water, stock, spices, vegetables, butter, flour, and served with lemon slices and egg balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight in 3 quarts of water.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and add 3 quarts of fresh water.

  3. Boil gently for 6 hours until reduced to 1 quart.

Make the soup

  1. Add 1 quart of stock, cloves, allspice, mace, cinnamon, celery, sweet herbs, onion, turnip, and carrot.

  2. Fry the onion, turnip, and carrot in 3 tablespoons of butter until soft.

  3. In the remaining butter, cook 1 tablespoon of flour until brown, then add to the soup.

  4. Simmer all together for 1 hour, then season with salt and pepper.

  5. Rub the soup through a fine sieve.

Serve

  1. Serve with lemon slices and egg balls.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Black beans
Form the main body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during long simmering.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the fried vegetables and adds richness to the soup.
Flour
Browned in butter, it thickens the soup and adds a toasted, nutty depth.
Stock
Adds savoury body and liquid for the soup base.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter until brown. Flour must be cooked long enough in the fat to lose its raw taste and brown evenly; if it is added raw or scorched, it gives a pasty or bitter flavour and uneven thickening.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, clove, allspice, cinnamon, celery, onion, turnip):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, clove, allspice, cinnamon, celery, onion, turnip. 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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