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Turtle Bean Soup

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Turtle Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Boil the beans until thoroughly soft.

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

Make the soup

  1. Wrap the thyme in a clean cloth and add it to the pot.

  2. Add the rice and let it boil for a few minutes.

  3. Slice the hard boiled eggs and drop them into the soup.

  4. Stir in the butter, black pepper, and coarse sea 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. Beans + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,017 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Thyme + ricetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together912 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 and thick, earthy base of the soup as they break down when boiled soft.
Rice
Adds body and thickens the soup slightly as its starch releases during boiling.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounder mouthfeel and richer flavour at the end of cooking.
Hard boiled eggs
Add soft, mild protein pieces that give texture contrast to the smooth soup.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until thoroughly soft. Dried beans must be fully cooked to become tender and digestible; undercooked beans stay firm and can leave the soup grainy. Rinsing the softened pulp through a colander then gives the soup its smooth body.

Swap the beans

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, rice, 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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