Skip to main content
Main

Black Bean Soup

A soup made from turtle beans, stock, spices, and served with hard‑boiled egg and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash the beans and soak them in cold water overnight.

  2. Drain the beans and cover them with 3 cups of boiling water.

Cook and strain

  1. Add the spices and simmer for about 2 hours until the beans are very tender.

  2. Press the mixture through a sieve and add the stock.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat on the stove until scalding hot.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Serve in a tureen with sliced hard-boiled egg and lemon.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Turtle beans
Provide the main body of the soup, thickening into a purée when pressed through a sieve.
Stock
Adds liquid and savoury depth, loosening the bean purée into a soup.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds a mild, rich garnish that contrasts with the smooth soup.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the earthy flavour of the beans.

The step that matters

Simmer until the beans are very tender. Dried beans must be fully softened before pressing; undercooked beans stay grainy and will not purée smoothly through a sieve, and the starches need time to break down.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, egg, lemon, clove, allspice, cinnamon, pepper):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, egg, lemon, clove, allspice, cinnamon, 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 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes