Black Bean Soup
Soak two quarts of black beans over night; in the morning put them on the stove to boil; when they are becoming soft add pieces of corn beef large enough to salt soup; boil until the beans are quite soft, strain through a colander, pour back into the soup kettle, and if too thick, add warm water to make it the proper consistency; season with pepper and ground cloves. Before sending to the table, add four or five eggs, boiled hard and chopped in small pieces. It is nice to add a sufficient quantity of any kind of wine, to give the soup a flavor of the wine. The soup is very good without the wine. Two quarts of beans will make enough soup for any ordinary-sized family for two days. If wanted for an early dinner, better begin boiling the beans the day before the soup is wanted. -Mrs. Clarence Shepard.
A generous late-Victorian bean soup that leans on corned beef for its salt and on cloves, sherry and chopped hard egg for the finish. The proportions are built for a household, not for two.
- Scale it downTwo quarts of dry black beans is roughly 3 1/2 pounds and yields well over a gallon of finished soup. A quarter of that quantity, about 2 cups of beans, feeds four generously.
- The corned beef is the saltNo salt is called for anywhere because the beef supplies it. Modern corned beef brisket varies enormously in saltiness; add a modest piece, taste the broth once the beans are tender, and correct with salt only then. Rinse the meat first if it is heavily brined.
- Cooking timeSoaked black beans need 1 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, not the all-day treatment implied here. Add the beef when the beans are about half tender so it does not shred to nothing.
- "Strain through a colander"This means pressing the softened beans through with a wooden spoon or ladle so the pulp goes into the pot and the skins stay behind. A food mill does the same job faster; a blender or stick blender gives a smoother, skin-inclusive soup, which is a matter of taste rather than error.
- Ground clovesA little goes a long way. Start with 1/8 teaspoon per quart of finished soup and work up; cloves dominate a bean puree quickly and cannot be pulled back out.
- The wineThe recipe leaves the choice open; dry sherry or Madeira is the usual pick for soups of this style. Stir it in off the heat just before serving, about a tablespoon per cup, so the aroma survives.
- The eggsChop the hard-boiled eggs coarsely and scatter them over each bowl rather than stirring them into the pot, where they cloud and break up. A thin slice of lemon is a common period addition.
- Keeping it two daysThe original assumes a cool larder. Refrigerate within two hours, and reheat only the portion you intend to serve; the puree thickens on standing and will want thinning with hot water or stock.
Black bean soup with cloves, hard egg and a glass of sherry is the standard nineteenth-century American formula, and it is generally understood as a domestic stand-in for the far costlier green turtle soup, which carried the same seasoning signature of spice, sherry and chopped egg. The bean itself is the black turtle bean, long grown in Latin America and cheap and shelf-stable enough to be a year-round pantry staple in northern kitchens. Recipes of this kind spread widely through community cookbooks and hotel kitchens in the second half of the century. The attribution to Mrs. Clarence Shepard is typical of the subscription cookbook, where recipes were solicited from local women and printed under their married names, and the practical closing notes about family size and starting the beans the day before are exactly the sort of guidance such contributors offered each other.