Skip to main content
Main

Bean Soup

Bean Soup is a hearty dish made from beans, water, optional meat, butter, flour, and seasonings.

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

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Add baking soda to 1 quart of beans and cover with water.

  2. Boil the beans until the hulls slip off.

  3. Skim the beans out.

  4. Place the beans in cold water.

  5. Rub the beans to remove hulls.

  6. Drain the beans.

  7. Repeat the hull removal until all hulls are removed.

Make the soup

  1. Combine 2 quarts of water and the cleaned beans in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture until the beans are smooth.

  3. If using meat, add it to the beans while boiling.

  4. If not using meat, rub together butter and flour.

  5. Add the butter and flour mixture to the soup.

Serve

  1. Serve the soup over toasted bread or crackers.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and parsley if desired.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  5. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the body of the soup, thickening into a smooth, hearty texture when boiled.
Baking soda
Raises the pot's alkalinity, helping hulls loosen so they can be rubbed off.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the soup a smoother mouthfeel when used without meat.
Flour
Combined with butter, helps thicken the soup when no meat is used.

The step that matters

Removing the hulls. Hulls left on the beans stay tough and can make the soup gritty. Boiling with baking soda loosens them, and rubbing in cold water separates them, so repeating until clean matters for a smooth result.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, meat, butter, flour, bread, pepper):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Turmericfits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, meat, butter, flour, bread, pepper. 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.

More bean soup recipes

Black 138Haricot 45White 36Baked 31Turtle 22Lima 16 See all 179 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesMeat CroquettesMeat Croquettes52 recipes