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Navy Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with navy beans, onions, ham bone, water, salt, and marjoram.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Navy Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the navy beans overnight.

  2. In the morning, fry the sliced onions in drippings until brown.

Cook the soup

  1. Add the fried onions to the soaked beans in a kettle with water, salt, and marjoram.

  2. Cook all ingredients slowly for 3 hours.

  3. Mash half of the beans through a colander and return to the soup.

Serve

  1. Heat the soup and serve with a thin slice of lemon in each portion.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  2. Beans + marjoramtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together63 recipes

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

  3. Onion + marjoramtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + hamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Beans + hamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Navy beans
Provide the main body and starch that thickens the soup as they cook and break down.
Onions
Frying until brown adds sweetness and savoury depth to the broth.
Ham bone
Releases savoury flavour into the water during the long simmer.

The step that matters

Cook all ingredients slowly for 3 hours. A slow, gentle simmer lets the beans soften evenly without bursting their skins. Boiling hard can break them apart unevenly and cloud the broth.

Swap the marjoram

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, ham):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Marjoramthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, ham. 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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