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Soup

Turtle Bean Soup

A soup made from black beans simmered with 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 until the beans are thoroughly soft.

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

  4. Add the thyme in a clean cloth 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 + 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
Provide the main body, starch, and earthy flavor of the soup once softened and pureed.
Thyme
Adds a herbal aroma that flavors the broth as it simmers.

The step that matters

Boil until the beans are thoroughly soft. Beans need full cooking for their starches to gelatinize and their cell walls to break down. Undercooked beans stay grainy and resist pulping through a colander, leaving the soup coarse.

“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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