Name: Black Bean Soup
Ingredients: 1½ pints black beans (or 1 pint if soaked overnight); 1 teaspoon summer savory; 1 onion (optional); small piece of pork; beef bone, turkey, or chicken bones; 1 lemon, sliced; 4 hard-boiled eggs, sliced; ⅓ cup wine; ½ cup tomato ketchup

Why it works: Beans and summer savory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 39 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the soup

If beans are not soaked overnight, rinse and cook 1½ pints; if soaked, use 1 pint.
Add summer savory, onion, pork, and bones to the pot.
Simmer until beans are tender.

Serve

In a soup dish, layer lemon slices and hard-boiled egg slices.
Pour in the wine and add the tomato ketchup 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.

Beans + summer savorytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together39 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,690 recipes

Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).
Summer savory + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together115 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,092 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
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

Black beans: Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during simmering.
Pork: Adds savory, meaty flavor to the broth as it simmers.
Wine: Adds acidity and aroma that brightens the finished soup.
Tomato ketchup: Adds sweetness and tang, rounding out the soup's flavor.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, summer savory, pork, beef, lemon, egg, wine):

Tomatofits better
Asparagusfits better
Shallotfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, summer savory, pork, beef, lemon, egg, wine. 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.