Home › Soups › Baked Bean Soup
Baked Bean Soup
4 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour salt, pepper, and celery salt 2 tablespoons chopped pickle Cook beans in water ten minutes; press through a sieve. Cook onion in butter five minutes; add flour and seasonings. When well blended, add tomato, cook five minutes, strain, add bean mixture, reheat, and serve with chopped pickles.
If beans are very sweet, it may be necessary to add one to two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar. 1 small cabbage 2 cups water 2 cups milk 3 slices onion
The printed page has run two recipes together: the butter-flour-pickle list belongs to this bean soup, while the trailing "1 small cabbage, 2 cups water, 2 cups milk, 3 slices onion" is the head of the cabbage soup that follows. Ignore the cabbage; the method itself is sound and is essentially a purée of leftover baked beans thinned with tomato.
- Missing quantitiesThe ingredient list as set in type is incomplete — no amount is given for the beans, the water, the tomato or the onion. Working backward from the 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour, about 2 cups cooked baked beans, 2 cups water, 1 cup canned or stewed tomato and 3 or 4 slices of onion give the right consistency. Treat those as a reconstruction, not the original.
- "Cook beans in water ten minutes"This assumes already-baked beans left from a previous meal, not dried beans. Ten minutes only loosens them enough to push through a sieve; dried beans need hours of soaking and simmering first.
- Use a food mill or blenderPressing through a sieve was the usual household method for pureeing. A food mill gives the same silky texture in a fraction of the time; a blender is quicker still, though it can leave the bean skins slightly gritty, so pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the original smoothness.
- The rouxCook the flour in the butter with the onion until it smells nutty but takes no colour, roughly two minutes. The recipe is explicit that the tomato goes in only "when well blended" — add it early and the flour will cook into lumps.
- Why the lemon juice mattersBoston-style baked beans are built on molasses, and a sweet batch turns this soup cloying. Taste before serving and add the vinegar or lemon juice a teaspoon at a time — it is the single adjustment that decides whether the soup reads as savoury.
- Celery saltStill sold. Season with the celery salt first, then correct with plain salt, since the blend is itself mostly salt and the soup will otherwise overshoot.
- The picklesThe recipe specifies only "chopped pickle," added at the table rather than cooked in. A sharp dill or a sour gherkin does more for the sweetness than a sweet pickle would.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities above, about four cups, enough for four small first-course servings; the original gives no yield. It thickens as it stands; thin with water or stock when reheating.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its bean recipes carry a strong local accent — baked beans were a Saturday-night fixture in New England households, and the tradition of baking them in quantity is usually linked to the Sabbath prohibition on cooking, which left cold beans for Sunday and, by extension, leftovers to be worked into something else afterward. This soup is plausibly that later dish. Puree soups built on a butter-and-flour base, thinned with tomato and sharpened with something acid, appear widely in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, and a pickle garnish added at the table rather than in the pot is one period way of cutting richness.