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Cream of Beans

A creamy soup made from hulled beans, milk, egg, olive oil, salt, cayenne pepper, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,470 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cream of Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Boil the beans until soft and mushy.

  2. Mash the beans through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. Add the milk, egg, olive oil, salt, and cayenne pepper to the mashed beans.

  2. Return the mixture to the heat and bring to a boil.

Thicken and finish

  1. For a thicker soup, retain 2 tablespoons of olive oil.

  2. In a saucepan, brown the retained olive oil with the flour.

  3. Smooth the flour mixture with part of the soup, then combine it all back into the pot.

  4. Allow the soup to boil together.

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 + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

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

  3. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Mashed into a soft purée that gives the soup its body and bulk.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base of the soup.
Egg
Adds richness and some body to the soup as it heats.
Olive oil
Adds fat for richness and, when browned with flour, helps build the thickener.
Flour
Its starch thickens the soup once cooked in hot fat and boiled with the liquid.

The step that matters

Smoothing the browned flour mixture with soup. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps. Cooking it in oil first coats each grain, and blending it smooth with some soup before returning it to the pot lets the starch disperse evenly. Boiling then swells the starch and thickens the soup.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, olive, pepper, flour):

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Milletfits about as well
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, olive, pepper, flour. 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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