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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup of black beans, stock, onion, cloves, butter, flour, eggs, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans for 12 hours.

Make the soup

  1. Cook the beans in the stock with the onion, cloves, salt, and pepper until tender.

  2. Press the mixture through a vegetable strainer.

  3. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour, and cook briefly.

  4. Stir the butter and flour mixture into the soup.

Serve

  1. Cut the hard boiled eggs into quarters and the lemon into slices.

  2. Place the eggs and lemon in a tureen before pouring in the soup.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

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

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

  5. Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 earthy flavor of the soup once cooked and pressed.
Butter
Enriches the soup with fat and flavor when cooked with flour.
Flour
Cooked briefly with butter to form a roux that thickens the soup.
Stock
Supplies the liquid in which the beans soften and flavour the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour mixture into the soup. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump. Cooking it briefly in butter first forms a roux, and stirring it in gradually helps it disperse evenly and thicken the soup smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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