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Turtle Bean Soup

A bean soup made with black beans, thyme, eggs, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,585 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Turtle Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Wash the black beans and place them in a pot with 3 quarts of water.

  2. Boil the beans until thoroughly cooked.

  3. Rinse the cooked beans through a colander and return the pulp to the pot.

Finish the soup

  1. Add thyme and let it boil for a few minutes to enhance the flavor.

  2. Drop in the sliced hard boiled eggs.

  3. Stir in the butter, pepper, and salt.

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. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Beans + thymetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together488 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  4. Thyme + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,758 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Break down into pulp to give the soup its body and thick texture.
Butter
Adds fat that rounds out the flavor and smooths the texture of the soup.
Dried thyme
Releases aromatic compounds into the hot liquid, adding herbal aroma.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until thoroughly cooked. Dried beans stay firm and can taste raw or starchy if undercooked. Full cooking softens the starches and breaks down the cell walls, which is needed for a smooth pulp and for safe digestion.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, egg, butter, pepper. 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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