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Black or Red Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked beans, vegetables, meat, butter, and wine, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Black or Red Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans in water overnight.

Make the soup

  1. Boil the soaked beans with the onion, carrots, celery, cloves, salt, red pepper, and meat for 6 hours in a large pot.

  2. Combine the sliced lemon, hard boiled eggs, butter, and wine in a tureen.

  3. Press the cooked beans and soup through a sieve into the tureen. Mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup very hot.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

  4. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Black or red beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it when pressed through a sieve.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the finished soup.
Sherry or red wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the soup.
Hard boiled eggs
Add body and a creamy richness to the soup in the tureen.

The step that matters

Press the cooked beans and soup through a sieve. Pressing the cooked beans breaks down their starch and fibre so they dissolve into the liquid, giving the soup its thickness and smooth texture. Leaving the beans whole would produce a thinner, grainier soup.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, butter, sherry, carrot, clove, celery, onion):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, sherry, carrot, clove, celery, onion. 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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