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Bean Soup
Soak a pint of beans in 3 or 4 quarts of water overnight; pour off in the morning, and put the beans on to boil in 2 quarts cold water. Fry a sliced onion in a tablespoonful of butter; add to the beans, with a piece of celery root. Boil gently till the beans are soft, adding cold water as it boils away; this checks too rapid boiling and softens the beans. Then rub them through a strainer, and add salt, cayenne pepper, and a saltspoonful of mustard; let it come to a boil, and thicken with a tablespoonful of flour and 2 tablespoonfuls of butter, which have been cooked together; this prevents the beans from settling. Slice a lemon and 2 hard-boiled eggs into the tureen, and pour over the hot soup.
Serve with croutons. If tomatoes are desired, add half a can before straining; and a quarter pound of salt pork, or bones and odds and ends of meat, may be an improvement.
The beans may be boiled to pulp, sifted, and thinned with brown soup stock, and when seasoned with ground herbs, spices, force-meat balls, and wine, is not unlike mock-turtle soup.
A pureed dried-bean soup thickened with a cooked roux, finished in the tureen with lemon and hard-boiled egg. The instructions are complete; only the units and a few assumptions need translating.
- Which beansAn unqualified "pint of beans" in an American book of this period is most likely dried white beans, navy or small marrow, though the recipe does not say. A pint is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz, enough for six to eight as a first course.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a scant 1/4 tsp of dry mustard powder for the whole pot; taste and add more if you want it forward.
- Celery rootCeleriac, not a celery stalk. A piece the size of an egg, peeled, is right. If you cannot find it, two large celery ribs plus a few leaves give a near-enough substitute.
- The roux is the pointFlour and butter cooked together before going in is what keeps the puree in suspension rather than settling into sludge under a watery layer. Cook the two together until the raw-flour smell goes, then whisk it into the simmering soup.
- Cooking timeExpect 1 1/2 to 2 hours of gentle simmering for soaked beans, longer if they are old stock. Salt goes in after they are soft, as the recipe has it -- and the periodic additions of cold water are there, in the recipe's own words, to check too rapid boiling and soften the beans.
- StrainingRubbing through a sieve gives a silkier result than a blender, because the skins stay behind. If you use a blender, pass it through a sieve afterward or the texture will be faintly gritty.
- Half a can of tomatoesCan sizes of the period varied and were often larger than a modern 14 oz tin, so read this loosely as a cup or two of canned tomatoes with their juice, added before straining so the skins and seeds come out with the bean hulls.
- The salt porkA quarter pound, diced, added early enough to give up its flavour to the boil. Cut back on the added salt if you use it.
- Lemon and egg in the tureenSlice both thin and lay them in the empty tureen, then pour the hot soup over so the egg warms without toughening and the lemon perfumes rather than stews. Serve at once.
History: The closing note -- boil to a pulp, thin with brown stock, season with herbs, spices, forcemeat balls and wine, and it is "not unlike mock-turtle soup" -- is the revealing line. Mock turtle was a prestige soup built to imitate real turtle, and here the same flavour profile is reached from a bag of beans and the odds and ends of the meat safe. The instruction to add "bones and odds and ends of meat" as an improvement belongs to the same habit of mind: the stockpot as a place where nothing edible was wasted.