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Baked Bean Soup

A hearty soup of beans, pork, onion, celery, and fried bread, simmered with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans in water overnight.

  2. On the evening of the first day, boil the beans until soft.

  3. On the morning of the second day, place the beans in a pudding dish with the pork and bake until brown.

Make the soup

  1. In a soup pot, combine the pork, beans, sliced onion, and celery.

  2. Add 3 quarts of cold water and boil down to 2 quarts.

  3. Strain the mixture through a colander and return to the pot.

  4. Season to taste and add the flour mixed with butter.

  5. Simmer for 10 minutes and serve over diced fried bread in a tureen.

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

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

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

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

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 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

Beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during boiling.
Streaked pork
Adds savoury, meaty flavour and fat to the broth as it bakes and simmers.
Flour
Thickens the soup slightly when mixed with butter and stirred in.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour blend smoothly into the soup.

The step that matters

Baking the pork and beans until brown. Browning through dry heat creates roasted, savoury flavours that carry into the broth, while overbaking can dry out the beans and pork.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, onion, flour, butter, pepper, bread. 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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