Bean Soup
Boil a small soup-bone in about two quarts water until the meat can be separated from the bone, remove bone, add a coffee-cup white beans soaked for two hours, boil for an hour and a half, add three potatoes, half a turnip and a parsnip, all sliced fine, boil half an hour longer, and just before serving sprinkle in a few dry bread crumbs; season with salt and pepper, and serve with raw onions sliced very fine for those who like them. - Mrs. A. B. Morey.
A straightforward one-pot soup that needs only a few translations of measure and some attention to the beans, which are the part most likely to misbehave.
- Soup-boneA "small soup-bone" means a marrow or shank bone with some meat still attached. Beef shank or a meaty short rib works; ask the butcher for a cross-cut shank rather than a clean marrow bone, since the recipe depends on the meat coming off it.
- Coffee-cupA coffee-cup was generally reckoned at about a cup, so figure roughly 6-8 oz of dried white beans. Navy, Great Northern or cannellini all suit.
- The two-hour soak is shortTwo hours will not fully hydrate modern dried beans, and old beans may still be hard after the stated hour and a half. Soak overnight, or expect to simmer well past the given time and add water as it boils away.
- Add salt lateThe seasoning is listed at the end. Salting once the beans are tender, and keeping them at a bare simmer, helps the skins stay intact.
- Root vegetablesHalf a turnip and one parsnip is a modest amount alongside the three potatoes. Sliced fine, they should be done in the stated half hour; cut them thicker and they will need longer.
- WaterTwo quarts will reduce considerably over two hours of open boiling. Top up to keep the beans covered, or you will end up with a stew rather than a soup.
- Bread crumbsDry crumbs stirred in just before serving would lightly thicken the soup as much as garnish it. Use a small handful and serve promptly, since they swell and go pasty if the soup stands.
- YieldRoughly four to six servings. The raw sliced onion is passed at the table, not cooked in -- it stays sharp and is meant to.
Bean soup built on a marrow bone is one of the oldest habits of thrifty cooking: the bone is a butcher's leftover, the beans are cheap storage protein, and the root vegetables are whatever the cellar held in late winter. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Minnesota and Ohio in the 1870s and 80s from contributions by named local women, is full of this kind of economy, and its soup chapter assumes a household that bought meat by the cut and used every part of it. The instruction to pass raw onion separately "for those who like them" is simply a serving note, though it may suggest that strong raw alliums were treated as a matter of individual taste rather than something to impose on the whole pot.