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Old Fashioned Bean Soup

A bean soup made with ham bone, soup beans, and onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Old Fashioned Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the ham bone with ½ cup of soup beans.

  2. Add 2 or 3 onions to the pot.

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

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

  2. Ham + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Ham + beanstop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ham bone
Gives the broth a smoky, savory flavor as it simmers.
Soup beans
Thicken the broth and add body and texture as they cook.
Onions
Add sweetness and aroma as they soften in the broth.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, onion):

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Peasfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, onion. 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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