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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked black beans, onion, butter, flour, and seasonings, served with lemon and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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.

  2. Drain the beans and place them in a pot with 2 quarts of cold water.

Make the soup

  1. Slice the onion and fry it in 1 tablespoon of butter, then add it to the beans.

  2. Simmer for 4 to 5 hours, adding about ½ cup of cold water every half hour to maintain the liquid level.

  3. Once the beans are soft, strain them and return to the pot.

  4. Add salt, pepper, and mustard to the beans.

  5. Mix the flour and remaining tablespoon of butter together, then add to the boiling soup.

Serve

  1. Slice the lemon and hard boiled eggs, and serve the hot soup over them in a tureen.

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. Beans + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  3. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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 as they soften and break down during long simmering.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and browns lightly when the onion is fried.
Flour
Thickens the soup as it cooks in the hot liquid, giving it body.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma when fried before going into the soup.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour and butter into the boiling soup. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump; blending it with butter first helps it disperse smoothly and thicken evenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pepper, mustard, flour, butter, lemon, egg. 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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