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White Haricot-bean Soup

A soup made from soaked white haricot beans, milk, salt, butter, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Haricot-bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash the beans overnight and soak them in cold water.

  2. Boil the beans for four hours before dinner.

  3. Pulp the boiled beans through a sieve.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the milk, salt, and butter to the soup.

  2. Bring the soup to a boil before serving.

Make the croutons

  1. Cut bread into half-inch dice.

  2. Fry the bread dice until light brown.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Beans + milktop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,266 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Once boiled and pulped, they provide the soup's body and thickness.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the earthy flavour of the pulped beans.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, savoury flavour to the soup.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until fully tender. Dried beans must cook long enough for their starch to soften fully. Only then will they break down smoothly when pulped through a sieve, giving a silky rather than grainy soup.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter):

  1. Cocoafits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter. 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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