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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with black beans, salt pork or veal, celery root, lemon, hard boiled eggs, and sherry.

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

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Soak and simmer

  1. Soak the black beans overnight in lukewarm water.

  2. Place the beans in a pot with 2 quarts of water and the salt pork or veal.

  3. Boil slowly for 3 hours, keeping the pot tightly covered.

  4. Add the celery root and a little pepper, then simmer for another 30 minutes.

  5. Strain the soup.

Garnish and serve

  1. Serve the strained soup in a tureen.

  2. Slice the lemon and hard boiled eggs thinly.

  3. Add the sliced lemon and eggs to the tureen with the sherry.

  4. Pour the hot soup over the lemon and eggs.

  5. Serve.

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. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

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

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 and thicken it as they break down during long simmering.
Salt pork or knuckle of veal
Adds savory, fatty richness to the broth as it simmers.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the finished soup in the tureen.
Lemon
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the rich, earthy soup.

The step that matters

Keep the pot tightly covered while boiling slowly. A tight lid limits evaporation so the liquid stays at volume and the beans soften fully over the long simmer, giving a smooth, well-cooked base. Boiling too hard would break beans apart unevenly and cloud the broth.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, celery, pepper, lemon, egg, sherry):

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, celery, pepper, 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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