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Baked Bean Soup
Fry slowly together I small chopped onion, 1 stalk of celery cut fine and I heaping spoonful of chopped carrot in a little dripping. Add 1/2 inch bit of bay leaf, a sprig of parsley, 1/2 cupful of tomato catsup, 1 pint of Boston baked beans, salt and pepper to taste and 3 pints of cold water.
Simmer until the beans are mushy, then press through a sieve. Reheat, add seasoning if needed and thicken with a little flour blended smoothly with cold water. Boil up once. serve with this soup cut stale bread in small dice and either fry it pale brown in a little dripping or spread on a pan and toast in the oven.
A leftovers soup built on a pint of already-cooked baked beans, so the flavour is decided before you start: sweet, molasses-heavy Boston beans will give a very different result from a plain tomato-sauce tin.
- The beansBoston baked beans are navy beans cooked long and slow with molasses, brown sugar and salt pork. A standard 15-16 oz tin is close enough to the pint called for. Since they are already seasoned and sweetened, hold back on salt until after sieving.
- DrippingBeef or bacon dripping, saved from roasting. Bacon fat is the closest match in a modern kitchen; butter or oil works but loses the savoury backbone the recipe assumes.
- "Heaping spoonful"Read as a heaped tablespoon of chopped carrot, roughly one small carrot. The vegetable measures here are all approximate by design and the soup is forgiving of them.
- Catsup, not ketchup as flavouringTomato catsup of this period was generally thinner and sharper than modern ketchup, which is markedly sweeter, though recipes varied. With sweet baked beans already in the pot, consider starting with a third of a cup and adding a splash of vinegar to bring back the acidity.
- SievingThis is the step that makes it a soup rather than stewed beans. A food mill or a blender followed by a strainer does the job in a fraction of the time; the skins are what you are trying to leave behind.
- ThickeningAbout a tablespoon of flour slurried in cold water is enough for this volume. The "boil up once" is not optional — raw flour tastes of paste, and a minute at a full boil clears it.
- YieldThree pints of water plus the beans gives four generous or six modest servings. It thickens noticeably as it cools and will need loosening on reheating.
- The croutonsThe recipe gives no oven temperature or time; a moderate oven, turning the dice once, is the usual modern equivalent. Stale bread is specified because fresh bread absorbs fat and goes greasy rather than crisp.
Bean soup made from the remains of Saturday night's baked beans is a New England household economy rather than a dish with an inventor, and it turns up under various names in American cookbooks through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Boston baked beans were, by an account often repeated in cookbooks, cooked in quantity on Saturday and eaten cold on Sunday, when Sabbath observance was said to discourage cooking; what survived to Monday went into the soup pot. The recipe's logic is visible in every line: vegetables fried in dripping, catsup standing in for fresh tomatoes out of season, stale bread turned into croutons rather than thrown out. The economy is the point: the expensive part of the soup, the long-baked beans, has already been paid for once.