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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup of soaked black beans simmered with herbs, onion, carrot, spices, and finished with a butter‑flour roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,443 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Pick over the black beans, then wash them.

  2. Soak the black beans overnight.

  3. Drain the beans.

Make the soup

  1. Add the beans to 2 quarts of fresh cold water with the bouquet of sweet herbs.

  2. Simmer gently until the beans break apart.

  3. Add the roasted onion, browned carrot, salt, clove, and peppercorns.

  4. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Return the mixture to the fire.

  6. If the soup is too thick, add boiling water or brown stock to achieve a creamy consistency.

  7. In a separate pan, cook the butter and flour together until browned.

  8. Dilute the browned butter-flour mixture with some soup.

  9. Stir the diluted mixture into the kettle.

  10. Simmer for an additional 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a hot soup tureen with lemon slices, quarters of hard-boiled egg, and sherry 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. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

  4. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  5. Beans + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together908 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Break down when simmered to give the soup its body and thick, creamy texture.
Butter and flour
Browned together to form a roux that thickens the soup and adds a nutty, toasted flavour.
Onion
Roasting adds sweet, caramelised depth of flavour to the soup base.
Carrot
Browning adds sweetness and a deeper colour and aroma to the soup.

The step that matters

Rubbing the mixture through a fine sieve. Cooked beans must be pushed fully through the sieve to get a smooth, creamy texture; skins and coarse bits left behind make the soup grainy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, clove, butter, flour, lemon, egg):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, clove, butter, flour, lemon, egg. 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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