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Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from black or turtle beans, water, optional stock, butter, flour, spices, cooking wine, egg yolks, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup base

  1. Combine the beans and water in a large pot.

  2. Boil steadily until the beans are soft.

  3. Mash the beans in the cooking liquid until smooth.

  4. Strain the mash through a colander back into the pot.

  5. If using stock, add it.

  6. If not using stock, mix butter and flour into a smooth paste and add it to the soup.

Season and finish

  1. Season with cayenne pepper, coarse sea salt, powdered mace, and ground cloves to taste.

  2. Just before serving, stir in cooking wine, the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, and sliced lemon.

  3. If the soup thickens too much, add boiling water to adjust the consistency.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Black or turtle beans
Form the main body of the soup as they soften and break down into a purée.
Butter and flour
Form a paste that thickens the soup when no stock is used.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and body to the soup just before serving.

The step that matters

Adding the hard-boiled egg yolks and wine just before serving. Egg yolks thicken and enrich when heated gently; if the soup boils after they are added, the yolks can curdle and become grainy. Adding them last, off strong heat, keeps the texture smooth.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, butter, flour, pepper, clove, wine, egg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, flour, pepper, clove, wine, egg. 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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