Skip to main content
Main

Puree of Mock Turtle Soup Beans

A creamy puree made from mock turtle soup beans, beef broth, onions, celery, and butter, served over fried bread with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Puree of Mock Turtle Soup Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans overnight.

  2. Add 1 quart of cold water to the beans.

  3. Heat the mixture for 1 hour, stirring often.

  4. Add the beef broth, onions, and celery.

  5. Cook gently for 3 hours until the beans are soft.

Strain and season

  1. Strain the mixture through a colander.

  2. Rub the strained mixture through the colander.

  3. Season the mixture with pepper.

  4. Return the mixture to the kettle.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  6. Stir in the butter rolled in flour.

  7. Simmer for 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour the soup over the fried bread in a serving dish.

  2. Pare the lemons.

  3. Slice the lemons thin.

  4. Lay the lemon slices on the surface of the soup before 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Onion + beeftop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mock turtle soup beans
Form the body of the soup, thickening into a smooth purée once rubbed through.
Beef broth
Provides the savory meaty base that carries the flavor of the soup.
Butter
Enriches the soup and, rolled in flour, thickens it as it simmers.
Lemons
Add acidity and bright aroma to balance the rich, heavy soup.

The step that matters

Stir in the butter rolled in flour. Flour-thickened butter must be whisked into a simmering liquid so the starch disperses and hydrates evenly; added to a cold or unstirred soup it clumps and leaves lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, celery, beef, pepper, bread, butter):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, celery, beef, pepper, bread, butter. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipes