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Haricot Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked haricot beans, stock, butter, cream, pepper, and salt, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Haricot Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the haricot beans overnight in water.

  2. The next day, boil the beans in salted water for 4 hours.

  3. Rub the cooked beans through a sieve with a wooden spoon.

Make the soup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the stock, bean pulp, butter, and season with pepper and salt.

  2. Heat the mixture on the stove and allow it to boil for a few minutes.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the cream.

Serve

  1. Serve with diced 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Beans + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Provide the main body and thick texture of the soup once pureed.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the soup.
White stock
Supplies the liquid base and most of the savoury flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the flavour when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Rub the cooked beans through a sieve. Pressing the soft beans through a sieve breaks them into a fine pulp that thickens the soup and gives it a smooth texture. Beans that are not cooked through will stay grainy and leave lumps.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cream, pepper, bread):

  1. Lima beansfits about as well
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, pepper, 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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