Bean Soup
1 cup white beans 1 quart water 2 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon onion salt soak the beans in cold water over night. Cook slowly in soft water for four or five hours or until the beans are perfectly tender. Put them through a colander; rub the butter, flour and salt together. Pour a little of the warm liquid over this, stirring while so doing, and then turn this into the remainder of the hot liquid. Add seasoning. Cook five to ten minutes. This should make one quart when finished. If lacking in quantity, add water sufficient to make one quart. Celery salt may be used in place of onion if preferred.
A plain purée-style bean soup thickened with a butter-and-flour paste rather than a roux. The method is sound; only the timings and a few assumptions need adjusting.
- Cooking timeFour to five hours suits older, drier beans and a slower stove. Soaked navy or great northern beans on a modern burner are usually tender in 60 to 90 minutes, and considerably faster in a pressure cooker. Cook until they crush easily between finger and thumb, since underdone beans will not pass a colander.
- Soft waterThe instruction is not decorative. Hard water and its calcium slow bean softening noticeably. If your tap water is very hard, use filtered or bottled water, or add a pinch of baking soda to the cooking water.
- Salt timingThe salt goes in at the end, with the butter and flour, rather than into the cooking water. A long-standing belief held that early salting toughens beans, though the recipe gives no reason of its own; modern testing suggests the opposite, that salting the soaking and cooking water gives more evenly seasoned, better-textured beans. Either way, the 1 1/2 teaspoons is for the finished quart, so taste before adding it all.
- Putting them through a colanderThis means forcing the cooked beans and their liquid through the holes with a wooden spoon or pestle, which strains out the skins and leaves a smooth purée. A food mill does the same job faster. A blender is quicker still but keeps the skins, giving a slightly grainier soup.
- The butter and flour pasteThis is beurre manié, worked cold and let down with a little hot liquid before it goes into the pot. Add it off the boil and whisk, or it will lump. The five to ten minutes of cooking afterwards is needed to lose the raw flour taste.
- Onion saltStill sold, though the strength varies by brand and it is largely salt. A teaspoon of onion powder plus adjustment of the plain salt gives more control, or sweat a small chopped onion with the beans from the start.
- YieldOne quart of finished soup, which is two generous bowls or four small first-course servings. A cup of dry beans absorbs a good deal of the quart of water, hence the note about topping up.
Meatless bean soups of this kind sit at the intersection of two traditions in American cookery: the frugal dried-legume pottage of the ordinary household, and the deliberately meat-free cooking promoted from the late nineteenth century by health reformers, sanitarium kitchens and vegetarian societies. Meatless purees of beans were not themselves a novelty — they had long been familiar from Lenten and French-influenced cookery — but what is striking here is the absence of salt pork or ham bone, which many bean soups relied on for both fat and savour. Butter and onion salt stand in for them, and the flour-thickened liquid gives the body that a pork stock would otherwise have supplied. Celery salt was sold commercially from the late nineteenth century and onion salt somewhat later, both marketed as a clean and modern way to season.