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Haricot Soup

A bean soup with onions, carrot, turnip, and dripping, simmered for hours and served with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Haricot Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak and drain the beans.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the beans, cold water, and dripping.

  3. Chop the onions, carrot, and turnip into very small pieces.

Make the soup

  1. When the soup boils, add the chopped vegetables and simmer for 2 to 4 hours until soft.

  2. Strain the soup through a wire sieve or colander into a bowl.

  3. Rub the vegetables through the sieve with a wooden spoon.

Finish and serve

  1. Season to taste, return the soup to the pan to heat, and serve with squares of toast.

  2. If using milk, add it with the seasoning.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 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

Beans
Provide the main body and starch that thicken the soup as they cook soft.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury flavour as they soften into the base.
Carrot
Adds sweetness and colour, and its pulp helps thicken the strained soup.
Turnip
Adds earthy flavour and body once cooked and rubbed through the sieve.
Dripping
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the soup a rich mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Simmering until soft. Dried beans need a long, gentle simmer to become fully tender. If they stay firm, the beans will not break down when rubbed through the sieve, leaving a grainy, thin soup.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, turnip, pepper, milk):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, turnip, pepper, milk. 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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