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Black or Turtle Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with black beans, beef, salt pork, onions, herbs, wine, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Black or Turtle Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans in water for 24 hours before cooking.

  2. In a large pot, combine the beef, salt pork, water, and chopped onions.

Cook the soup

  1. Boil for 5 hours.

  2. Mash and strain out the bean skins.

  3. Add the herbs, pepper, and coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Stir in the wine.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the hard boiled eggs and serve with lemon.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Thyme + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Break down when mashed to give the soup body and a thicker texture.
Beef
Long simmering releases meaty flavour and gelatin into the broth.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savoury depth that carries through the whole soup.
Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, building the soup's base flavour.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the rich, heavy broth.

The step that matters

Mash and strain out the bean skins. Bean skins are tough, fibrous, and do not break down in simmering, so leaving them in makes the soup gritty. Mashing the softened beans releases starch that thickens the broth, and straining keeps it smooth.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, pork, onion, thyme, celery, pepper, wine):

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Sesamefits about as well
  3. Black-eyed peafits less well
  4. Chestnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, onion, thyme, celery, pepper, wine. 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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