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Red Kidney Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from kidney beans, steak bone, spices, and cream, finished with lemon and hard‑boiled egg.

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 ↓

Red Kidney Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the steak bone and kidney beans in the cold water.

  2. Add the bay leaves, cloves, whole spices, and black pepper.

  3. Boil slowly for 3 hours, adding water if necessary.

  4. Add the sliced onion and boil for 2 hours longer.

  5. Mash the mixture through a sieve twice.

Finish and serve

  1. When ready to serve, add salt, cream, sliced lemon, and the hard-boiled egg chopped fine.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Clove + oniontop 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

Kidney beans
Provide the main body and starchy base that thickens the soup when mashed.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Egg
Adds body and a soft, rich texture when chopped into the soup.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich soup.

The step that matters

Mash the mixture through a sieve twice. Pushing the cooked beans through a sieve breaks them down and smooths the texture. Sieving twice removes remaining skins and fibres, so the soup is fine and even rather than grainy.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, pepper, cream, egg, onion, lemon):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, cream, egg, onion, 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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