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Black Bean Soup
2 cups black beans 3 tablespoons Crisco, 1 onion, 1 lemon, 2 quarts stock or water, 2 stalks celery, 2 hard-cooked eggs, 1 tablespoons flour, 3 cloves, 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, salt pepper, red pepper, and mustard to taste.
Wash beans and soak over night; in morning drain, cover with boiling water and boil 30 minutes; drain, throwing away water. Slice onion, dice celery, and cook 5 minutes in half of Crisco in soup pot; add beans, stock or water, and cloves. Simmer until beans are soft, add more water as stock or water boils away. Rub through sieve, add remaining Crisco and flour rubbed together, then heat to boiling point, add seasonings. Cut lemon in thin slices, removing seeds, and cut eggs in thin slices. Put them into a hot soup tureen, and strain soup over them.
A straightforward purée soup from a Crisco promotional cookbook; the only unfamiliar things are the shortening and the sieve. Plan on about two and a half hours of unattended simmering after the overnight soak.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so it appears where an earlier cook would have used butter, bacon fat or salt pork. Three tablespoons of butter or a neutral oil does the same work; butter can be used for the flour-and-fat thickening at the end if you prefer its flavour.
- Beans and timingTwo cups of dried black turtle beans, soaked overnight, will take roughly 1.5 to 2 hours of gentle simmering to go truly soft after the initial 30-minute boil. The recipe's instruction to top up with water matters: the beans must stay covered or the tops harden.
- The discarded waterBoiling 30 minutes and throwing the water away is often explained as a way to make the beans easier to digest. It also throws away colour and flavour. Skipping it and simmering straight through gives a darker, better soup; keep it if digestion is the priority.
- Rub through a sieveThis is the hinge of the texture. A food mill or a blender followed by a sieve gets you there faster, but straining afterwards is worth it either way, because black bean skins remain noticeable in the puree however long they cook.
- ClovesThree whole cloves, and fish them out before puréeing. Ground cloves at that quantity would dominate everything.
- ThickeningFat and flour "rubbed together" is a beurre manié, stirred into the hot soup rather than cooked first. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces, then return to a boil for a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Seasoning"Red pepper" is cayenne; "mustard" here means dry mustard powder. Both go in at the very end, along with the Worcestershire, and the soup wants more salt than you expect if you used water rather than stock.
- ServingSix to eight portions. The lemon and hard-cooked egg slices go into the warmed tureen and the soup is poured over them, so the lemon perfumes the surface without stewing in the pot; use a thin-skinned lemon and slice it paper thin.
Black bean soup finished with sliced lemon and hard-cooked egg is the standard American hotel and club version of the dish, where the acid and the egg were there to cut a very heavy pur"e. Versions of the soup have also been made with Madeira or sherry instead of the Worcestershire seen here. This particular text comes from a book published to promote Crisco after its introduction in 1911, which explains why vegetable shortening stands in for the salt pork or butter that older versions of the same soup used.