Home › Soups › Cream of Bean Soup
Cream of Bean Soup
1 cup white beans 1 1/2 quarts water 2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 2 cups milk or milk and cream 1 teaspoon onion salt soak the beans over night. Drain, and cook in one and a half quarts of boiling water. When tender, rub through a colander, and add to the liquid in which they were cooked. Make a white sauce of the flour, butter, milk and cream. Then add the seasoning, and add to the mashed beans . Cook together five minutes, and serve.
A standard purée-and-white-sauce soup of the sort that filled the meatless chapters of early twentieth-century cookbooks. Nothing here is difficult, but a few of the proportions and methods repay attention.
- YieldOne cup of dried beans plus a quart and a half of water and two cups of milk makes roughly two quarts of finished soup, enough for six as a first course or four as a light supper.
- Soaking and cooking timeOvernight soaking then simmering in boiling water will take 45 to 90 minutes depending on the age of the beans. Old beans from the back of the cupboard may never soften; buy them where they turn over quickly.
- Salt timingThe recipe lists two teaspoons of salt without saying when to add them. Older manuals routinely advised salting only once the beans were tender, on the belief that salted water slows softening; more recent testing disputes this, so either point in the process will serve.
- Rub through a colanderThis is the 1900s purée step, done with a wooden pestle or the back of a spoon. A food mill or a stick blender does the same job in a fraction of the time; a standing blender gives a smoother result but will also whip air into it.
- SkinsA colander or food mill catches the skins, which is much of the point. If you use an immersion blender, the skins stay in and the soup is grainier — pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the texture the recipe intends.
- The white sauceCook the flour in the butter for a minute or two before the milk goes in, or the soup tastes of raw flour. Add the milk gradually and whisk until it thickens; two tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of milk is a thin sauce by the usual scale, which is what you want in something that will be let down further by the bean liquid.
- Onion saltA teaspoon of onion salt is mostly salt; roughly a quarter teaspoon of onion powder plus three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt will stand in for it. Taste before adding more, since the beans already carry two teaspoons.
- The last five minutesOnce the milk mixture goes in, keep the pot below a boil and stir. A bean purée thick with starch scorches on the bottom quickly, and hard boiling can curdle the sauce.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s, driven partly by wartime food conservation campaigns and partly by health-reform and vegetarian movements associated with sanitariums and religious groups. Bean soups earned their place in such books because dried legumes were among the cheapest reliable sources of protein on the shelf, and thickening a bean purée with a butter-and-flour white sauce turned a plain peasant pottage into something that could be sent to table in a tureen. The technique — cook, sieve, enrich with a cream sauce — is the standard "cream of" formula of the period, applied indifferently to beans, peas, celery, corn and tomatoes; only the vegetable changed.