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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup of soaked black beans, onion, celery, butter, Worcestershire sauce, lemon, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight in 2 quarts of cold water.

  2. Drain the beans and replace the water with 2 quarts of fresh water.

Cook and finish the soup

  1. Fry the chopped onion and celery in 1 tablespoon of butter.

  2. Add the fried vegetables to the beans and boil until tender.

  3. Pass the mixture through a colander and return it to the stove.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

  5. Blend 1 tablespoon of flour with 1 tablespoon of butter and a little lemon juice, then stir into the soup.

  6. Pour in ½ glass of sherry wine before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Beans + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  5. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Black beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during boiling.
Flour
Thickens the soup when blended with butter and stirred in.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour from the fried vegetables and the flour mixture.
Celery
Adds savoury aroma and flavour when fried with the onion.
Sherry wine
Adds a finishing depth of flavour just before serving.

The step that matters

Blending the flour and butter into the soup. Flour stirred in directly forms lumps; blending it with butter and lemon juice first makes a smooth paste that disperses evenly and thickens the soup without clumping.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, celery, butter, pepper, sauce, flour, lemon):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, celery, butter, pepper, sauce, flour, lemon. 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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