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Meatless Bean Soup
Parboil one pint beans, drain off the water, add fresh, let boil until perfectly tender, season with pepper and salt, add a piece of butter the size of a walnut, or more if preferred; when done skim out half the beans, leaving the broth with the remaining half in the kettle, now add a tea-cup sweet cream or good milk, a dozen or more crackers broken up; let it boil up, and serve.
A plain nineteenth-century pottage: beans cooked soft, half of them left whole in the broth, the rest of the body coming from cream and crushed crackers. A few of the measures need translating.
- A pint of beansDried beans were measured by volume, not weight. A pint is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz, which yields six to eight servings of soup. Any dry white bean works; navy or Great Northern are reasonable choices.
- The parboil-and-drain stepBoiling briefly, discarding that water and starting again with fresh turns up in cookbooks of the period and is worth keeping. It removes some of the oligosaccharides that cause gas and cuts the raw, dusty flavor of old beans. The recipe mentions no overnight soak, so allow two hours or more of simmering in the second water.
- A piece of butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons; walnut-sized butter is an approximate period measure. "Or more if preferred" is not idle; 2 to 3 tablespoons suits modern palates better.
- A tea-cup of creamA teacup in books of this period is generally reckoned smaller than a cup measure, roughly 3/4 cup. Heavy cream will be rich enough to need thinning; the recipe itself offers "good milk" as the alternative.
- Don't hard-boil after the dairy"Let it boil up" means bring it just to the point of rising and pull it off. Sustained boiling after cream goes in will curdle it, especially if the beans have been salted heavily.
- The crackersA dozen means plain soda or water crackers, drier and harder than a modern saltine. Use about 1 to 1 1/2 cups of coarsely broken crackers, and add them at the very end, as they thicken fast and turn pasty if left to sit.
- SeasoningSalt is added once the beans are tender, which is sensible with old dried beans. Taste again after the crackers go in, since they carry their own salt.
- TextureThe recipe skims out half the beans while the rest stay in the broth; it does not say when the skimmed half rejoins the pot, though serving them together is the evident intent. Mash or briefly blend the half left in the kettle if you want the broth genuinely creamy.
"Meatless" is the whole point of the title. Bean soup of the period was commonly made with a ham hock or a piece of salt pork, and a version without it would have suited a meatless day or a time when the pork barrel was low. Buckeye Cookery, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and first issued in the mid-1870s in connection with a fundraising effort for the First Congregational Church of Marysville, Ohio, is full of these quiet economies. The richness here comes from cream and butter rather than cured pork, and the crackers do the work of a thickener. Broken crackers stirred into soup at the last minute were a common American habit through the nineteenth century, with water crackers and butter crackers sold from the barrel and treated less as a garnish than as an ingredient.