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Soup

Turtle Bean Soup

A simple soup made from black beans, water, and thyme.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 488 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Turtle Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the black beans and place them in a pot with 3 quarts of water.

  2. Boil the beans until they are thoroughly soft.

  3. Rub the pulp through a colander and return it to the pot.

  4. Wrap the thyme in a clean cloth and add it to the pot.

  5. Let the soup 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 + thymetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together488 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Once softened and pressed, their pulp forms the body and thickness of the soup.
Fresh thyme
Wrapped in a cloth, it releases herbal aroma into the soup without loose leaves.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until thoroughly soft. Beans must be fully tender before pressing. Under-cooked beans stay firm and grainy, so the pulp will not pass smoothly through the colander or give the soup a silky texture.

“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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