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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup of soaked black beans, pork, and hard‑boiled eggs, thickened with cornstarch and seasoned with salt, pepper, cloves, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the soup

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

  2. In a large pot, cook the soaked beans in 3 quarts of water with the pork or beef bones until tender.

  3. Thicken the soup with cornstarch, then sift and season with salt and pepper.

Finish and serve

  1. Slice the lemon very thin.

  2. Dice the egg whites and place them in the bottom of a tureen.

  3. Rub the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs with a little soup, then add to the pot and stir.

  4. Pour the soup into the tureen and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Beans + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together908 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Black beans
Break down during long simmering to give the soup its body and earthy base.
Lean pork
Adds savory flavor and some fat to the broth as it cooks.
Cornstarch
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks mashed into the soup enrich its texture; diced whites add substance.
Cloves
Contribute a warm, aromatic spice note to the soup.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup with cornstarch. Cornstarch must be mixed into a little cold liquid first and then stirred into hot soup, otherwise it clumps. Its starch granules swell and thicken the soup only when heated near a simmer.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits about as well
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, pepper, egg, clove, lemon. 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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