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Pomeranian Soup
Soak 3 cupfuls of red kidney beans over night in cold water; drain, cover with fresh boiling water and simmer until very soft. Drain, rub one-half of them through a fine sieve, adding to them gradually equal quantities of stock and the water in which they were boiled until reduced to a thin broth. Add to this 1 bunch of sweet herbs, salt and pepper, simmer for half an hour, remove the herbs and add the reserved whole beans. Simmer for fifteen minutes longer and serve with long croutons of fried bread.
A thrifty purée-and-whole-bean soup that gets its body from the beans alone, no roux or cream. The original assumes you know how thin "a thin broth" should be, so the liquid quantities are left to judgement.
- Boil the beans hard firstDried red kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin, which is destroyed by ten minutes at a full rolling boil. Cover the soaked beans with boiling water, keep them at a genuine boil for at least ten minutes, then drop to a simmer until very soft — roughly 1 to 1.5 hours. A slow cooker that never reaches boiling is the wrong tool here.
- Quantities3 cupfuls of dried beans is about 1.25 lb and swells to some 7-8 cups cooked. Expect 8 to 10 servings, which is more than most households want; halve it freely.
- "A bunch of sweet herbs"This is a bouquet garni: parsley stems, thyme, a bay leaf, and often marjoram or savoury, tied with string or bundled in muslin so it lifts out whole. Sweet here means aromatic, not sugary.
- StockNo quantity is given because the cook is meant to thin the purée by eye. Start with about 4 cups total liquid — half stock, half bean cooking water — and add more until it coats a spoon thinly. Beef or ham stock is period-appropriate; vegetable stock works and keeps the dish meatless.
- Rubbing through a sieveA blender or food mill does this in seconds. If you use a blender, pass the purée through a sieve afterwards anyway to catch skins, which is the whole point of the original instruction.
- The bean cooking waterThe recipe deliberately reuses it, and it carries starch that thickens the soup. It can also be muddy-tasting if the beans were dusty; taste it before committing, and top up with stock if it is not good.
- Seasoning at the endBeans absorb a surprising amount of salt. Season lightly during the half-hour simmer and correct after the whole beans go back in, since the purée will have concentrated by then.
- The croutons"Long croutons" means fingers of bread cut from a stale loaf and fried in butter or dripping, not diced cubes. Fry them just before serving; they go soft within minutes on the soup.
Pomerania is the Baltic coastal region straddling what is now northeastern Germany and northwestern Poland, much of it thin, sandy farming country where dried beans, peas and root vegetables carried households through winter. The dish as written is a hybrid: the technique is the classic continental purée of pulses, thinned with stock and finished with fried bread, but the ingredient is the red kidney bean, a New World plant that spread through European kitchens over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dried pulses were a cheap source of protein, and foreign place-names attached readily to plain bean soups on English and American menus.