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Haricot Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with haricot beans, onions, carrots, cloves, mace, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Haricot Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash and pick the beans.

  2. Soak them overnight in cold water.

  3. Strain the beans.

Simmer the soup

  1. Place them in a clean pan with the vegetables, mace, cloves, and cold water.

  2. Bring to a boil slowly.

  3. Simmer gently for 2 to 3 hours, adding more cold water as needed.

Finish and serve

  1. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  2. Add milk, seasoning, and chopped parsley.

  3. Reheat the soup.

  4. Serve.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

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

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 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

Haricot beans
Form the body of the soup as they soften and break down into a thick purée.
Milk
Adds richness and a creamy, smooth texture to the finished soup.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and savoury flavour that builds the base of the soup.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and colour while flavouring the simmering liquid.

The step that matters

Simmer gently for 2 to 3 hours. Bringing the soup to a hard boil can break up the beans unevenly and make the mixture cloudy or scorched on the bottom. A gentle simmer lets the beans soften fully and evenly, and topping up with cold water keeps them covered.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, clove, parsley, carrot, milk, pepper):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, clove, parsley, carrot, milk, 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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