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Black Bean Soup

A creamy soup made from soaked black beans, herbs, stock, sherry wine, lemon, and diced hard-boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight.

  2. Cook the beans with the herbs until tender.

Make the soup

  1. Drain the beans and pass them through a puree sieve.

  2. Add enough brown stock to achieve a cream-like consistency.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  4. Stir in the sherry wine, lemon slices, and diced hard-boiled egg.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Form the main body of the soup, thickening into a purée when pressed through a sieve.
Brown stock
Adds liquid to bring the purée to a smooth, cream-like consistency.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and a deeper, aromatic flavour to the soup.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and texture as a diced garnish stirred into the soup.

The step that matters

Pass the beans through a sieve. Beans must be fully tender before puréeing, or the soup stays grainy and bits of skin remain. Pressing them through a sieve removes the skins and gives the smooth body the soup needs.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, thyme, clove, sherry, wine, pepper, lemon):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Lentilsfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, thyme, clove, sherry, wine, pepper, lemon. 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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