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Black Bean Soup
1 pint of black turtle beans, 1 quart of stock or one pound of 2 hard-boiled eggs, lean beef, I lemon, 1½ quarts of boiling water, Salt and pepper to taste, If wine is used, one gill.
Wash the beans well in cold water, soak over night. In the morning drain, put in a soup kettle with boiling water, if you use beef add it. Cover and simmer gently two hours. Now add another pint of boiling water, press all through a purée sieve. Wash the kettle, return the soup to it. Bring it to boiling point, salt and pepper. This soup should be thick, but if too thick, add sufficient water to make it of a proper consistency. Add one tablespoonful of grated onion and pour into the soup tureen over the eggs hard boiled and cut in slices, and the lemon cut in slices. Add the wine and serve at once.
A very good way is to have the eggs hard boiled and cut in slices, and the lemon cut into slices and both covered with the wine about fifteen minutes before the soup goes into the tureen.
I shin, I carrot, I sweet potato, I ear of corn, 1 cup of beans,
The ingredient list has come through in scrambled form — the trailing fragment beginning "I shin, I carrot" belongs to a neighbouring recipe and should be ignored. What follows is a straightforward purée of black turtle beans, garnished in the nineteenth-century manner with sliced egg, lemon and fortified wine.
- The hinge: cook the beans until they collapseTwo hours is the minimum for soaked black turtle beans and often not enough, particularly with older beans or hard water. They must be soft enough to push through a sieve with the back of a ladle; if they resist, keep simmering rather than forcing them, or the soup will be thin and gritty.
- A gill of wineHalf a cup. The recipe says only 'wine'; a fortified wine such as Madeira or sherry is the likely intention. Add it off the heat so the aroma survives. Steeping the egg and lemon slices in it for fifteen minutes, as the recipe suggests, is worth doing.
- Quantities and liquidA pint of dry beans is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz. With 1½ quarts of boiling water plus a further pint added before sieving, you will have around 2 quarts if you take the beef option, and nearer 3 quarts if the quart of stock goes in as well — six to eight servings.
- Stock or beef, not bothThe original offers a choice. If you use the pound of lean beef, it goes in with the beans at the start and is simmered with them; the recipe does not say to lift it out, though pressing everything through the purée sieve will leave it behind. With stock alone the soup is quicker.
- Purée sieveA food mill or drum sieve does what is meant. A blender gives a smoother result but leaves the skins in, which changes the texture; if you blend, pass the soup through a sieve afterwards for the intended finish.
- Salt timingSalt is added at the end here, after sieving, which is sound practice for a bean purée that has been simmered with beef — the reduction concentrates whatever salt the meat or stock carries. Season only once the soup is at its final consistency.
- Grated onionA tablespoon of raw grated onion stirred in at the end is deliberate, not a substitute for cooked onion. It provides the sharp note the recipe otherwise lacks; grate it on the fine side of a box grater and use the juice as well.
Black bean soup finished with hard-boiled egg, lemon and Madeira appears in American cookery of the later nineteenth century, and turns up in household manuals of the 1880s and 1890s in almost identical form. The dressing of sliced egg and lemon is often loosely associated with mock turtle soup, where chopped egg was said to stand in for the green fat and eggs of the real turtle — an association made easier by the fact that the bean itself was sold as the "black turtle bean," though the link is traditional rather than documented. In the recipe the beef is optional and the stock interchangeable with water, so that a dried legume, properly cooked and sieved, could carry a formal dinner course largely on its own.