Name: Puree of Mock Turtle Soup Beans
Ingredients: 1 quart mock turtle soup beans; 1 onion, chopped; 4 stalks celery, cut small; 2 quarts beef broth (from boiled corned beef), fat removed; pepper, to taste; diced fried bread, for serving; 2 lemons; 1 quart cold water; 1 tablespoon butter, rolled in flour

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 ↓

Puree of Mock Turtle Soup Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

Soak the beans overnight.
In the morning, add 1 quart of cold water and heat for 1 hour, stirring often.

Make the soup

Add the beef broth, onions, and celery, and cook gently for 3 hours until the beans are soft.
Strain the mixture, rubbing it through a colander, and return it to the kettle.
Season with pepper and stir in the butter rolled in flour.
Simmer for 5 minutes and pour over the fried bread in a serving dish.

Serve

Pare the lemons, slice thin, and lay on the surface of the soup before serving.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,159 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).
Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,092 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

Mock turtle soup beans: Form the body of the soup as they soften and break down during long cooking.
Beef broth: Provides the savoury base liquid that carries the flavour of the soup.
Butter: Rolled in flour, it thickens the soup and gives it a smoother body.
Celery: Adds aromatic, vegetal flavour as it cooks down into the broth.

The step that matters

Stirring in the floured butter. Butter rolled in flour must be stirred in gradually and simmered briefly so the flour cooks and thickens the soup without leaving lumps or a raw flour taste.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, celery, beef, pepper, bread, butter):

Avocadofits better
Lemonthe original
Limefits about as well
Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, celery, beef, pepper, bread, butter. 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.

Brown Bread461 recipes

Lemon Sauce236 recipes

Roast Beef211 recipes

Beef Loaf175 recipes

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Puree of Mock Turtle Soup Beans