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Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with beef, salt pork, black beans, celery, onion, and seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

  2. Chop the beef and salt pork.

Make the soup

  1. In a large pot, combine the beef, pork, soaked beans, celery, and onion.

  2. Simmer all ingredients together for 5 to 6 hours.

  3. Strain the soup and season with coarse sea salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with sliced lemons.

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. Beef + porktop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

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

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

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

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

  4. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  5. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Provide the body and starchy thickness of the soup as they break down during long simmering.
Round beef
Contributes savory meaty flavor that deepens during the long simmer.
Salt pork
Adds rich fat and savory depth that carries through the broth.
Onion
Builds aromatic sweetness and savory base flavor as it cooks down.
Celery
Adds fresh, aromatic vegetable flavor to the simmering broth.

The step that matters

Long simmer of all ingredients together. Dried black beans need a long, gentle simmer to become fully tender and to release starch that thickens the soup. Cooking too hard can break up the beans unevenly and cloud the broth, so keep the heat low and steady.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, pork, beans, 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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