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Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made with soaked black beans, onion, celery, spices, butter, flour, and served with hard boiled eggs and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans overnight.

  2. Drain and add cold water in the morning.

Cook the soup

  1. Slice the onion.

  2. Cook the onion in half the butter for five minutes.

  3. Add the onion and broken celery stalks to the beans.

  4. Simmer for three to four hours, adding more water as it boils away until the beans are soft.

  5. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  6. Reheat to boiling point.

  7. Mix in salt, pepper, mustard, and cayenne.

  8. Thicken with the remaining butter and flour cooked together.

Serve

  1. Serve with chopped hard boiled eggs and lemon juice.

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. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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, once sieved, its thick, smooth texture.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the onion's flavour when cooked gently at the start.
Flour
Cooked with butter to form a roux that thickens the soup.
Hard boiled eggs
Add soft, mild richness and body to the finished soup as a garnish.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the heavy, earthy flavour of the beans.

The step that matters

Thicken with the butter and flour cooked together. Cooking flour in fat forms a roux; if the flour is stirred in raw or not cooked through, the soup can taste pasty and thicken unevenly.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, celery, pepper, mustard, butter, flour, 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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