Name: Baked Bean Soup
Ingredients: ½ pint white beans; 2 to 2½ quarts boiling water; 1 tablespoon pearled tapioca; coarse sea salt (to taste); powdered thyme (to taste)

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 ↓

Baked Bean Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

½ pint white beans
2 to 2½ quarts boiling water
1 tablespoon pearled tapioca
coarse sea salt (to taste)
powdered thyme (to taste)

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the beans

Soak the white beans overnight.
In the morning, drain the beans and place them in an earthen dish with boiling water.

Bake and finish

Cover and simmer in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 4 to 5 hours.
Soak the tapioca overnight in enough water to cover.
When the beans are soft, rub them through a colander.
Add the soaked tapioca, salt, and enough water to achieve the desired soup consistency.
Return to the oven and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

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.

Beans + thymetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together488 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

White beans: Form the body of the soup, breaking down into a thick purée when rubbed through a colander.
Pearled tapioca: Thickens the soup as its starch swells and gelatinises during cooking.

The step that matters

Rubbing the beans through a colander. The beans must be fully soft before they are pressed through, otherwise the purée will be grainy and lumpy. Cooking long and slow until tender lets the starch and cell walls break down so the soup becomes smooth.

“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.