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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked black beans, salt pork or ham bone, cloves, lemon, and optional sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 908 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

Cook

  1. In a kettle, combine the soaked beans, 2 quarts of water, and salt pork (or ham bone).

  2. Add the cloves and simmer for 4 to 5 hours until the beans are soft, adding more boiling water as needed.

  3. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add a slice of lemon and the grated yolk of the hard boiled eggs mixed with the egg white to form egg balls.

  2. Stir in sherry wine to taste, if desired.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Beans + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

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

  4. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 as they soften and break down during long simmering.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory depth to the broth as it simmers with the beans.
Hard boiled eggs
Yolks are grated and whites mixed into egg balls as a garnish for the soup.

The step that matters

Simmering until the beans are soft. Dried beans need long, gentle simmering to soften fully; stopping early leaves them firm and the soup grainy. Adding boiling water as needed keeps the level steady without stalling the simmer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, clove, egg, sherry, 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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