Skip to main content
Main

Black Bean Soup

A hearty soup made from soaked black beans, celery root, onion, and seasonings, thickened with butter and flour and finished with sherry wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the black beans overnight, then drain.

  2. Add the beans to a pot with the celery root, onion, clove, parsley, and peppercorns tied in cheesecloth. Cover with cold water and boil slowly until tender, adding water as needed.

Purée and thicken

  1. Once soft, remove the seasonings and pass the beans through a sieve, mashing them with a spoon.

  2. Stir in the soup stock.

  3. Melt the butter in a pan, stir in flour, and gradually add to the stock mixture.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. In a tureen, add sherry wine, a slice of lemon, egg balls, and diced egg white just 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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  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
Break down into a smooth purée that forms the body of the soup.
Soup stock
Provides the liquid base that carries the flavour and sets the soup's consistency.
Flour
Its starch thickens the stock once heated, giving the soup a fuller texture.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flour smoothly into the stock.
Sherry wine
Adds aroma and a light acidic brightness to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the stock. Flour clumps when it meets hot liquid unevenly. Stirring it into melted butter first and adding it gradually lets the starch disperse and thicken the stock smoothly without lumps.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, celery, butter, flour, clove, parsley, 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes