Name: Cranberry Bean Soup
Ingredients: 1 pint cranberry beans; 2 quarts stock (or ½ pound pork and 2 quarts water); ¼ teaspoon pepper; ½ teaspoon salt; 1/10 teaspoon powdered clove; 2 hard-boiled eggs, sliced thin; 1 small lemon, sliced thin; ½ cup sherry; 1 tablespoon butter

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cranberry Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

Soak the cranberry beans overnight.
Boil the beans in water until very soft, then drain and rub through a sieve.

Make the soup

Add the strained beans to 2 quarts of stock and season with pepper, salt, and powdered clove.
If using pork, boil it in 2 quarts of water for 1 hour, then add the strained beans.
If the soup is too salty, pour off the water from the pork and add fresh.
Bring the mixture to a boil.
Stir in the butter before serving.

Serve

In a tureen, place the sliced hard-boiled eggs, lemon, and sherry.
Pour the soup over the eggs and lemon.
Optionally, cut the pork into small dice and serve with 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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Cranberry + beanstop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together55 recipes

Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Cranberry + clovetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together61 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Cranberry + lemontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together210 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cranberry beans: Form the body of the soup when boiled soft and rubbed through a sieve.
Stock: Provides the liquid base and savory flavor for the soup.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Sherry: Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the eggs and lemon in the tureen.

The step that matters

Rubbing the beans through a sieve. Beans must be boiled until very soft before sieving; undercooked beans stay grainy and will not pass smoothly, leaving the soup coarse in texture.

Swap the cranberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pork, pepper, clove, egg, lemon, sherry):

Limefits better
Orangefits about as well
Avocadofits about as well
Cranberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, pepper, clove, egg, lemon, sherry. 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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Cranberry Bean Soup