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White Bean Soup
Soak 3 cupfuls of dried white beans for eight hours. Drain, and then cover them with 2 quarts of boiling water. Boil the beans until they are tender and broken to pieces. Rub them through a sieve and return to the fire with the water they were boiled in. Add a quart of stock, in which a piece of corned beef or a ham has been boiled. If too salt, add other soup stock. Boil for an hour, season to taste; stir in a tablespoonful of butter which has been rolled in 1 tablespoonful of flour and put into the tureen. Put a handful of croutons on the surface of the soup.
A straightforward puree soup built on the salty liquor left from boiling corned beef or a ham. The only real judgment call is salt, since the meat stock does the seasoning for you.
- Taste the stock firstHam and corned beef liquor varies wildly in salt. Taste before adding it, and be ready to dilute with unsalted stock or water as the recipe suggests; you cannot pull salt back out later.
- Beans and soaking3 cups dried navy or Great Northern beans is about 1 1/4 lb. Eight hours of cold soaking is still the standard, though a quick soak (boil 2 minutes, stand 1 hour) works equally well. Very old beans may never soften; buy within the year if you can.
- Cooking timeExpect 1 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer for the beans to fall apart. Hold back acid until they are tender, or the skins toughen; the recipe in any case leaves seasoning to the end.
- SievingA food mill or a blender does in a minute what the sieve did in twenty. If you blend, do it in batches and leave the lid vented; hot puree expands.
- The second hour of boilingAn hour at a full boil after the stock goes in will scorch a thick bean puree. Keep it to a slow simmer, stirring the bottom, and 20 to 30 minutes is plenty to marry the flavors.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié — equal parts soft butter and flour worked into a paste. Whisk it in off the boil in small pieces so it disperses; it thickens lightly and gives gloss.
- CroutonsCubes of stale bread fried in butter or ham fat, added at the table so they stay crisp.
- YieldThe pot starts at about 3 quarts of liquid (2 quarts water plus 1 quart stock) and will reduce with the long boiling; figure on roughly 2 to 2 1/2 quarts finished, serving 6 to 8 as a first course.
White bean soup of this kind is thrift cooking dressed for the table: the beans are cheap, and the flavor comes entirely from water that has already done a day's work boiling a ham or a piece of corned beef. Versions of it are common in nineteenth-century American household manuals. The final flourish -- beurre manié stirred in and croutons scattered over the tureen at the last moment -- is a standard puree finish of the period, borrowed from French practice and applied to a pot of navy beans. The best-known descendant is the Senate bean soup served in the United States Capitol, generally traced to the early 1900s, which follows the same logic of beans plus ham.