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Turtle Bean Soup

A soup made from soaked black beans, water, salt, thyme, hard boiled eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 488 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Turtle Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

  2. Combine the soaked beans and cold water in a kettle.

  3. Boil slowly until the beans are tender.

  4. Rub the beans through a colander and return them to the kettle.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and thyme.

  2. Slice the hard boiled eggs and add them to the soup.

  3. Stir in the butter and serve hot.

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 + thymetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together488 recipes

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

  2. Thyme + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,758 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,030 recipes

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

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; rubbing them through a colander thickens it to a smooth texture.
Hard boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy contrast to the smooth soup.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, rounding out the flavor and smoothing the soup.

The step that matters

Boil slowly until the beans are tender. Gentle simmering lets the beans soften evenly without bursting or sticking to the kettle. Rapid boiling can break the skins and make the soup cloudy, while undercooked beans stay grainy and resist being pressed through a colander.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (thyme, egg, butter):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against thyme, egg, 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.

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