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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with soaked black beans, water, stock, spices, vegetables, butter, flour, and served with lemon slices and egg balls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the black beans overnight in 3 quarts of water.

  2. In the morning, drain the beans and add 3 quarts of fresh water.

  3. Boil gently for 6 hours until reduced to 1 quart.

Make the soup

  1. Add 1 quart of stock, allspice, mace, cinnamon, celery, sweet herbs, onions, turnip, and carrot.

  2. Fry the chopped vegetables in butter until soft.

  3. In the remaining butter, cook the flour until brown, then add to the soup.

  4. Simmer the soup for 1 hour.

  5. Season with salt.

  6. Strain through a fine sieve.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of lemon and egg balls.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during long boiling.
Butter
Softens the chopped vegetables and carries flavour from the aromatics into the soup.
Flour
Cooked in butter until brown, it thickens the soup and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Onions
Build a sweet, savoury base as they soften in butter.
Stock
Adds savoury depth and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter until brown. Flour cooked in fat until brown develops a toasted flavour and thickens less than raw flour. If it is stirred in before it browns, it can taste raw and pasty, and it may lump if not mixed in smoothly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, allspice, cinnamon, celery, onion, turnip, carrot):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, allspice, cinnamon, celery, onion, turnip, carrot. 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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