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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, black beans, vegetables, wine, and seasoned with spices, served with hard‑boiled eggs and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Place the beef in a soup kettle with the cold water and simmer all day.

  2. Strain the meat and bones from the liquid and refrigerate the liquid to cool.

  3. Remove the fat from the liquid and add the chopped soup vegetables.

  4. Boil the vegetables for 1 hour, then strain them out.

Finish the soup

  1. Add the soaked black beans to the liquid and boil until they can be passed through a colander like a paste.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, ground allspice, ground cloves, and ground mace to taste.

  3. Stir in the wine.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup in a tureen, garnished with diced hard-boiled eggs and lemon on top.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Carrot + beanstop 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
Break down into a paste when boiled, thickening the soup and giving it body.
Shin of beef
Slow simmering releases gelatin and flavor, giving the broth richness and body.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Boiling the beans until they pass through a colander like a paste. Beans must be fully softened to break down and thicken the soup. Undercooked beans stay firm, won't purée through a colander, and leave the soup grainy and thin.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, carrot, celery, beans, pepper, allspice, clove):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, carrot, celery, beans, pepper, allspice, clove. 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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