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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with black beans, stock, butter, flour, herbs, and sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight, then drain.

  2. Add the parsley, celery root, bay leaf, peppercorns, clove, and onion tied in cheesecloth, cover with cold water, and boil slowly until tender, adding water as needed.

  3. Once the beans are soft, remove the seasonings and pass the beans through a sieve, mashing them with a spoon.

Make the soup

  1. Add the soup stock to the mashed beans.

  2. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, and gradually mix into the stock.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Just before serving, add the sherry wine, lemon slice, and diced egg white to the tureen.

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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  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 beans
Form the body of the soup once softened and sieved into a thick purée.
Butter
Enriches the soup with fat and a rounder, smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the stock when cooked in butter and mixed in, giving the soup more body.
Soup stock
Supplies the liquid base that thins the bean purée into soup.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and a mellow, aromatic note to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the butter and flour into the stock. If flour is added without first cooking it in the melted butter, or stirred in too quickly, it clumps and leaves lumps. Mixing gradually into the stock keeps the thickening smooth.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, flour, parsley, celery, clove, 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.

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