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Bean Soup

A hearty bean soup made with various beans, onions, potato, and optional tomato juice, served with bread or carrots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash the beans and soak them in 1 quart of warm soft water overnight.

  2. The next day, add 5 pints of cold or boiling water and bring to a boil.

Make the soup

  1. Add the chopped onions, potato, and parsley or other flavoring.

  2. Let the mixture simmer slowly for 3 hours or longer, then strain.

Thicken and serve

  1. In a clean saucepan, heat some oil or butter and mix with the flour.

  2. Gradually add the strained bean soup to the saucepan and let it boil for a few minutes.

  3. Serve with fried bread or bread and butter, and raw carrots.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  4. Beans + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

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

  5. Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,798 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Provide the main body and starch that give the soup its substance.
Potato
Breaks down during simmering to add body and thicken the broth slightly.
Flour
Cooked in fat to form a roux that thickens the strained soup.
Onions
Release sweetness and savory depth as they simmer in the broth.

The step that matters

Adding the soup to the roux. Pouring liquid into a hot flour and fat mixture all at once can cause lumps. Adding it gradually while stirring lets the flour disperse evenly so the soup thickens smoothly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Cuminfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, potato, butter, flour, tomato, bread. 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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