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Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with dried beans, salt pork, onion, celery, and pepper, served with sliced lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the dried beans overnight in soft water.

  2. Drain the beans and cover them with lukewarm water for 2 hours.

Cook the soup

  1. In a large pot, combine the beans, cold water, and salt pork.

  2. Boil slowly for at least 4 hours.

  3. Add the shredded onion and chopped celery, and season with pepper.

  4. Simmer for an additional 30 minutes.

  5. Rub the mixture through a colander until only husks and fibers remain.

Serve

  1. Serve with sliced lemon.

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. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried beans
Form the body of the soup as they soften and break down during long cooking.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory depth that flavors the broth during the long simmer.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savory flavor to the soup base.
Celery
Contributes mild aromatic flavor to the soup as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for at least 4 hours. Beans need prolonged gentle cooking to become fully tender. A hard rolling boil can break them apart unevenly and cloud the broth, so keep the heat low and the liquid barely moving.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, onion, celery, 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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