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Black Bean Soup with Mock Meat Balls

A hearty soup of black beans, vegetables, and mock meat balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 4 cups of water.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and cover with fresh water, then bring the beans to a boil.

  3. Drain the beans and add 4 cups of fresh water.

Make the soup

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

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

  3. Cook the beans until they are tender.

  4. Press the cooked beans through a sieve.

  5. Return the soup to the heat. Add more water if the soup is too thick.

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.

  4. Serve the soup.

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
Provide the main body and starch that thicken the pureed soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour from the sautéed vegetables into the soup.
Onion
Sweetens and builds savoury depth when fried in butter.
Green pepper
Adds fresh, slightly bitter vegetable flavour to the soup base.
Hard boiled egg
Adds soft texture and mild richness to the finished bowl.

The step that matters

Press the cooked beans through a sieve. Pressing softened beans breaks down their starch and cell walls, which gives the soup a smooth, thickened body. Under-cooked beans will not purée well and leave a grainy texture.

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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