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Bean Soup with Onions

A creamy bean soup flavored with sautéed onions, butter, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Soup with Onions

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Parboil the beans, drain the water, rinse the beans, and add fresh water.

  2. Boil the beans until very soft, about 30 minutes.

Prepare the onions

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter and fry the sliced onions until light brown; season with salt and pepper.

  2. Sprinkle the flour over the onions and stir well before adding to the soup.

Finish the soup

  1. Just before serving, add the thin cream to the soup and let it boil.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  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. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the main body of the soup and thicken it as they soften during boiling.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and flavor as they brown in butter.
Butter
Carries the onions' flavor and helps them brown in the skillet.
Flour
Thickens the soup by binding with the onion fat when stirred in.
Thin cream
Adds richness and body to the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the cream to the soup. Once cream is boiled it can separate or curdle, so it is added just before serving and allowed only to heat through. Boiling it hard for long may cause it to break and turn grainy.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Cashew nutfits about as well
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, flour, pepper, cream. 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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