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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with soup bone, black beans, onion, lemon juice, pepper, salt, and Worcestershire sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, boil the soup bone, black beans, and chopped onion together for 6 hours.

  2. Strain the mixture to remove solids.

  3. Add lemon juice, pepper, salt, and Worcestershire sauce to taste.

Serve

  1. Slice the lemon and place on top when serving.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Provide the main body and starchy thickness of the soup as they cook down.
Soup bone
Releases flavour and richness into the broth during long simmering.
Onion
Adds savoury aromatic flavour that builds as it cooks into the broth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich, earthy soup.

The step that matters

Long boil of the soup bone, beans and onion. Six hours of gentle boiling is needed to extract flavour from the bone and to soften the beans fully. Stopping early leaves the broth thin and the beans firm.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, pepper, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, pepper, sauce. 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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