Skip to main content
Main

Bean Soup

A hearty soup of white beans, pork, turnip, potatoes, and spices thickened with flour and cornmeal.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 400 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the white beans overnight.

  2. Change the water and bring the beans to a boil, then change the water again.

  3. Add plenty of water and parboil the beans.

Make the soup

  1. In a separate pot, partially cook the piece of pork.

  2. Add the pork to the beans along with plenty of water.

  3. Once the beans begin to break, skim them out and return them to the pot with the pork.

  4. Add the red pepper pod or cayenne pepper.

  5. Remove the pork if it is cooking too quickly.

  6. Add the sliced turnip and cook for a while.

  7. Then add the diced potatoes.

  8. Twenty minutes before serving, add the Indian dumplings.

  9. Stir in a thickening made from flour and fine cornmeal.

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 + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Turnip + flourtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

White beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during cooking.
Pork
Adds savoury flavour and richness to the broth as it cooks with the beans.
Potatoes
Soften into the broth and add body and starch to the soup.
Flour and fine cornmeal
Form a thickening that gives the soup a fuller, smoother body.

The step that matters

Parboil the beans and change the water. Soaking and changing the water removes compounds that cause bean bitterness and gas, and beans need thorough cooking to become tender and digestible. Skipping these changes leaves the soup tasting harsh and the beans firm.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pork, pepper, turnip, flour):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork, pepper, turnip, 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipes