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Austrian Bean Soup

A hearty bean soup with carrots, onions, turnip, celery, and dripping, simmered for hours and served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Austrian Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans in cold stock.

  2. Bring the stock slowly to a boil.

  3. Add sugar and peppercorns, along with a clove.

Make the soup

  1. Slice the vegetables and fry them brown in the dripping.

  2. Add the fried vegetables to the stock and boil gently, skimming frequently, for three hours or more.

  3. Pass the soup through a coarse sieve, reheat, and season to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with croutons.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Brown haricots (beans)
Provide the main body and thickening that give the soup its substance.
Dripping
Fat that browns the vegetables, adding richness and savoury flavour.
Onions
Browning in fat builds sweetness and depth of flavour in the base.
Stock
Liquid that cooks the beans and carries the flavour of the whole soup.

The step that matters

Fry the vegetables brown in the dripping. Browning the vegetables develops deeper flavour through the Maillard reaction and caramelisation. Pale vegetables leave the finished soup tasting flat.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, celery, sugar. 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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