Home › Soups › Turtle Bean Soup
Turtle Bean Soup
Soak one pint black beans over night, then put them into three quarts water with beef bones or a small piece of lean salt pork, boil three or four hours, strain, season with salt, pepper, cloves and lemon juice. Put in a few slices of lemon, and if wished add slices of hard-boiled eggs. Serve with toasted bread cut into dice and placed in the tureen. - Mrs. H. C. Clark, Kankakee, IU.
A plain black bean soup dressed to imitate the clear turtle soups of nineteenth-century hotel dining. Nothing here is difficult, but the seasoning and the straining are the whole point.
- Turtle beans"Turtle bean" is simply the old market name for the black turtle bean, the ordinary black bean sold dried today. One pint dry is 2 cups, about 14 oz, and yields roughly 5 to 6 cups cooked.
- The straining"Strain" most likely means working the cooked beans through a sieve or food mill and returning the purée to the liquid, though it could as easily mean straining the solids out for a clearer soup; a blender gives a smoother, more modern texture. Discard the bones and pork, or dice the pork back in if you would rather not waste it.
- Cooking timeThree to four hours suits an old range and beans of uncertain age. The recipe soaks its beans overnight, and soaked beans in a heavy covered pot are usually soft in 1½ to 2 hours; a pressure cooker will do it in a fraction of that. Keep the liquid at a bare simmer or the beans break up and scorch on the bottom.
- Salt pork and saltSalt pork is still sold, usually near the bacon; a piece the size of an egg is plenty. Season with salt only after the beans are tender and the pork has given up what it will, since the pork's own salt can otherwise leave the finished soup harsh.
- ClovesThe quantity is left open, and cloves dominate quickly. Two or three whole cloves added to the pot, or a good pinch of ground clove stirred in at the end, is the outer limit for three quarts of soup.
- LemonThe lemon juice goes in off the heat; boiled, it turns flat and slightly bitter. Start with the juice of half a lemon and add more to taste — the acid is what lifts the purée and mimics the sharpness of a real turtle soup.
- Egg and croutonsSlice the hard-boiled eggs and float them in the tureen rather than cooking them in the soup. The diced toast is best cut small and dried in a 350F oven for ten minutes so it holds up in hot liquid.
- YieldThree quarts of water plus the beans gives six to eight generous servings, allowing for reduction over the long simmer.
Green sea turtle soup was the luxury clear soup of the nineteenth-century public dinner, and a whole literature of substitutes grew up around it: mock turtle from a calf's head, and cheaper still, bean soups seasoned and garnished to suggest it. The lemon slices, cloves and sliced hard-boiled egg here are often associated with turtle soup service, borrowed and laid over an inexpensive pur/u00e9e of dried beans. That the beans themselves were called "turtle beans" — a name generally traced to the shell-like shape and dark color of the dried seed — made the substitution almost a pun. Buckeye Cookery (1877) collected such recipes from contributors across the Midwest, and this one, credited to a Kankakee, Illinois, cook, is a fair example of how a frugal household could set something that read like hotel fare on the table.