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Bean Soup

A bean soup made with white beans, pork, red pepper, turnip, potatoes, and a flour‑cornmeal dumpling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 in water.

  2. Change the water.

  3. Bring the beans to a boil.

  4. Change the water again.

  5. Add plenty of water.

  6. Parboil the beans.

Make the soup

  1. In another pot, partially cook the piece of pork.

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

  3. Once the beans begin to break, skim them out.

  4. Add the skimmed beans to the pork.

  5. Add the red pepper pod or cayenne pepper.

  6. If the pork is nearly done, remove it from the pot.

  7. Add the sliced turnip.

  8. Cook for a while.

  9. Add the diced potatoes.

  10. Twenty minutes before serving, stir in the Indian dumplings made from flour and 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 savory, fatty flavor to the broth as it cooks.
Potatoes
Add starch that softens and gives the soup a fuller body.
Flour and cornmeal
Form the dumplings, which set into firm, starchy pieces in the simmering soup.

The step that matters

Skimming the beans once they begin to break. Beans that are skimmed out at the right moment keep their shape and avoid over-thickening or clouding the broth. Removing them then also leaves room for the rest of the ingredients to cook evenly.

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.

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