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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with black beans, water, optional meat, onions, spices, lemon, eggs, and optional port or sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soup

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

  2. Boil the beans for 3 hours with any bones or meat, or with 1 pound of lean beef and 1 slice of salt pork.

  3. Add the sliced onions and cook until the beans are very soft.

  4. Rub the soup through a sieve and add spice and cloves to taste.

Serve

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

  2. Strain the soup into the tureen, stirring well.

  3. Add the port or sherry if desired.

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. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 recipes

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

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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, thickening it as they break down during long boiling.
Bones or meat
Add savory depth and richness to the cooking liquid as it simmers.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, adding savory flavor to the soup base.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add a mild, creamy richness and texture as a garnish in the tureen.
Port or sherry
Adds sweetness, fruity aroma and a mellow depth when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Rub the soup through a sieve. Pressing the cooked beans through a sieve breaks them into a smooth purée that thickens the soup. Beans must be very soft first, or the purée will be grainy and the sieve will clog.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, meat, clove, lemon, egg, sherry):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, meat, clove, lemon, egg, sherry. 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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