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Black Bean Soup
1 cup black beans 3 pts. water 1 small onion, 2 hard boiled eggs, 1 small lemon} sliced 1 oz. fat meat 2 teaspoons salt 1 clove 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne Soak beans over night; in the morning drain and add cold water, with meat, onion and clove. Simmer three hours, or until beans are soft. Add more water or stock as water boils away. Rub through a puree strainer. Season with salt and pepper. Be sure the beans are thoroughly cooked or the soup will have a granular feeling to the tongue. Serve in tureen, over the sliced eggs and lemon.
A straightforward puree that depends almost entirely on cooking the beans past the point most cooks would stop.
- The hingeThe beans must be collapsing, not merely tender, or the strained soup feels gritty. Expect the full three hours at a bare simmer, and taste a bean before you strain: if it holds any chalkiness at the center, keep cooking.
- Quantities and yield3 pints is 6 cups. A cup of dried black beans plus that water yields roughly 4 to 6 first-course servings after straining.
- "1 oz. fat meat"Salt pork or a piece of bacon; the point is fat and cured savor rather than meat in the bowl. A 1-oz scrap of slab bacon or the end of a ham hock does it. The recipe does not say to fish out the meat, onion and clove, but the puree strainer will hold them back in any case.
- Puree strainerMost likely a conical sieve worked with a pestle. A food mill on the fine plate is the closest modern equivalent; a blender followed by a fine sieve also works, though blended soup tends to come out lighter in color and a little foamy.
- Salt timingTwo teaspoons is measured for the finished pot, and the recipe adds it after cooking. Salting the soaking water or the early simmer is now generally accepted as harmless to texture, but keep the bulk of the salt for the end since the pot reduces unpredictably over three hours.
- SoakingAn overnight soak and a drain is still the standard approach, and draining is worth doing here since the soup is not meant to taste raw-beany. Beans more than a year or two old may never soften fully, whatever the timing says.
- The garnishSliced hard-boiled egg and lemon go in the tureen and the hot soup is poured over. Slice both thin, and use the lemon in rounds with the peel on for aroma; it is meant to be seen through the dark soup, not stirred in.
Black bean soup finished with sliced lemon and hard-boiled egg was a familiar dish in American hotel and restaurant cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, and is often linked with Boston kitchens; the lemon-and-egg garnish echoes the way turtle soup was dressed, with the acid and the egg serving the same brightening role.