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Baked Bean Soup

A soup made from baked beans, water, onion, tomatoes, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the beans, water, and onion. Bring to a boil and simmer for 30 minutes.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Add the tomato and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Mix in the butter or drippings and flour that have been cooked together.

Serve

  1. Serve with crisp crackers.

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. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 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

Baked beans
Provide the main body and starch that thicken the soup when simmered and sieved.
Butter or drippings
Add fat and richness, carrying flavour through the soup.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with the fat before being stirred in.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and colour, balancing the sweetness of the beans.

The step that matters

Cooking the butter or drippings with the flour. Cooking fat and flour together into a roux removes raw flour taste and lets the flour thicken smoothly without lumps when stirred into the hot soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, butter, flour, tomato, pepper):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, flour, tomato, pepper. 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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