Skip to main content
Main

Saturday Bean Soup

A bean soup cooked with salt pork, water, and optional vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Saturday Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Parboil the beans

  1. In a pot, combine beans, water, and salt pork.

  2. Parboil until the beans are ready for the oven.

  3. Remove the pork and some beans, leaving enough for soup.

  4. Keep the pot on the back of the stove to stay hot.

Finish the soup

  1. Thirty minutes before dinner, heat the soup and add more water and vegetables.

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 + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Provide the main body and starch that thicken the soup as they soften.
Salt pork
Adds fat and savory, smoky flavor that seasons the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Parboil until the beans are ready for the oven. Parboiling only partly softens the beans, so they finish cooking later in the pot. Stopping at the right point keeps them intact rather than mushy when the soup is reheated.

“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

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes