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Black Bean Soup with Mock Meat Balls

A hearty soup of soaked black beans, vegetables, and mock meat balls, finished with diced lemon and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup with Mock Meat Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight in 1 quart of water.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and cover them with fresh water.

  3. Bring the water to a boil, then drain it off and add 1 quart of fresh water.

Make the soup

  1. In a skillet, fry the onion, carrot, turnip, and green pepper in butter until softened.

  2. Add the fried vegetables to the beans along with the bay leaf, peppercorns, and cloves.

  3. Cook until the beans are tender, then press through a sieve.

  4. Return the soup to the heat and add more water if it is too thick.

Add the meatballs and serve

  1. Prepare the mock meat balls by boiling them in water until cooked.

  2. Drop the meat balls into the hot soup.

  3. Pour the soup over the diced lemon and egg in a tureen and serve.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 once cooked and pressed through a sieve.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion, carrot, turnip and green pepper before they enter the soup.
Onion
Adds savory aromatic flavor as it softens in butter.
Hard boiled egg
Adds body and richness when served in the soup.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the soup.

The step that matters

Press the beans through a sieve after they are tender. Pressing fully cooked beans breaks them down so the soup gains a smooth, thick body. Beans that are not fully tender stay grainy and will not purée well.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, turnip, pepper, butter, clove, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, pepper, butter, clove, egg. 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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