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Haricot Soup

A hearty bean soup made with haricot beans, onions, carrot, turnip, and dripping, simmered for hours and served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Haricot Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans overnight, then strain them.

Make the soup

  1. Put the beans in a saucepan with the fat and cold water or stock.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Cut the vegetables into small pieces and add them when the soup boils.

  4. Simmer for 2 to 3 hours, or until soft.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain through a wire sieve or colander into a bowl.

  2. Rub the vegetables through with a wooden spoon.

  3. Season to taste.

  4. Return to the pan to heat.

  5. Serve with squares of toast or fried bread.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Haricot beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they soften and break down.
Onions
Add savoury sweetness and aroma as they cook into the base.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour, and thickens the soup when rubbed through.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavour and body when cooked soft and pressed through.
Dripping
Carries flavour and adds richness to the soup.

The step that matters

Simmer until soft. Dried haricot beans need a long, gentle simmer to become fully tender. If they are undercooked, they stay firm and grainy and will not purée smoothly when the vegetables are rubbed through the sieve.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, turnip, pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, 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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