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Haricot Bean Soup

A bean soup made with haricot beans, onion, carrot, salt, butter, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,017 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Haricot Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the haricot beans in cold water overnight with a small piece of baking soda.

  2. The next morning, place the beans in a saucepan with 3 pints of water, the onion, carrot, and salt.

  3. Cook until the beans are tender.

Finish the soup

  1. Pound the beans and strain through a wire sieve, discarding the onion and carrot.

  2. Stir in the powdered sugar and butter just before serving.

  3. Optionally, add a little rice to the soup.

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 + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,017 recipes

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

  2. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,477 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
Provide the main body and thickness of the soup once pounded and strained.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Powdered sugar
Adds a little sweetness to balance the savoury flavour of the beans.

The step that matters

Cook until the beans are tender. Beans that are undercooked stay firm and grainy, so they will not pound into a smooth purée. Cooking until fully soft lets the starches break down so the strained soup becomes silky.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, carrot, butter, sugar, rice):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, carrot, butter, sugar, rice. 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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