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Dried Bean Soup (1 pint of white soup beans)
1 pint of white soup beans, ¼ pound of bacon, I onion, Salt and pepper to taste.
I soup bone, 2 bay-leaves, Cover the beans with cold water, soak over night. In the morning drain, put them in a soup kettle with the bacon and small soup bone. Bones left from roast beef will answer. Add two quarts of water and simmer gently until the beans are tender, about one and a half hours. Then press through a purée sieve and return the contents to the kettle. Add sufficient water to make it the consistency of cream, bring it to boiling point, season and serve with croûtons.
A plain purée-style bean soup of the kind that appeared in nearly every American household manual around 1900. The typography has garbled a fraction or two, and the ingredient list includes two things the method forgets to mention.
- The letter-I quantitiesThe bacon reads a quarter pound, as printed. Each "I" in the ingredient list is the numeral 1: one onion, one soup bone.
- A pint of dried beansPeriod recipes like this one measured dry beans by volume rather than weight. A pint is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz to 1 lb depending on the bean, and yields about 6 cups cooked.
- Onion and bay leavesThe method never says when to add them. Put both in with the beans, bacon and bone at the start, and fish out the bay leaves before you sieve.
- "White soup beans"Any small white bean: navy, Great Northern, or cannellini. The term appears to have covered the ordinary cheap dried white beans kept for soup.
- The timing is optimisticAn hour and a half assumes recently dried beans. Older supermarket beans often want two hours or more. Judge by whether they crush easily against the side of the pot, not by the clock, and hold the salt until they are tender.
- Sieve or blenderA purée sieve means a sieve worked with a pestle, or a food mill; either gives a smooth soup and leaves the skins behind. An immersion blender is faster but keeps the skins, so the result is thicker and slightly grainier. Discard the bone and any bacon rind before puréeing.
- Consistency and seasoning"The consistency of cream" means pourable, coating a spoon thinly. The bacon and bone carry most of the salt, so taste before adding any.
- YieldTwo quarts of water plus what you add back gives roughly 6 to 8 cups of finished soup, four to six servings. The original specifies croûtons rather than offering them as an option.
Dried bean soup pressed through a sieve was standard economy cookery in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American kitchens, where the interesting instruction is "bones left from roast beef will answer" efore had had rather than what it would buy. Pura