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Mexican Bean Soup

A hearty soup of soaked beans, veal knuckle, butter, lemon, egg, wine, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mexican Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Place the soaked beans in a pot with 3 quarts of water, the knuckle of veal, and the butter.

  2. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil for 6 hours.

  4. Strain the soup.

  5. Add ½ cup of wine.

Garnish

  1. Slice the lemon.

  2. Chop the hard-boiled egg finely.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Provide the body and starchy thickening that give the soup its substance.
Veal knuckle
Adds gelatin and meaty flavour to the broth during the long simmer.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished broth.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic depth to the soup.

The step that matters

Boil for 6 hours. A long, steady simmer is needed to break down the beans and extract gelatin from the veal knuckle. Boiling too hard can cloud the broth and break the beans apart unevenly.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, egg, butter, pepper, lemon, wine):

  1. Peasfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, butter, pepper, lemon, wine. 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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