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Baked Bean Soup

A soup made with baked beans, water, onion, celery, tomatoes, and chili sauce, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine butter, baked beans, water, onion, and celery.

  2. Simmer for thirty minutes.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Add the strained tomatoes and chili sauce.

  5. Season with salt and pepper.

  6. Bind the soup with the butter and flour cooked together.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  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

Baked beans
Form the body of the soup and thicken it when pureed through a sieve.
Flour
Thickens the soup when cooked with butter and stirred in to bind it.
Butter
Carries flavor and, cooked with flour, helps bind the soup smoothly.
Stewed tomatoes
Add acidity and a rounded tomato flavor to the soup.
Chili sauce
Adds sweetness, tang and gentle heat to the tomato base.

The step that matters

Bind the soup with the butter and flour cooked together. Flour must be cooked in the butter before it goes into the soup; otherwise it stays raw and tastes floury and can form lumps instead of thickening smoothly.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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