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Soup (Pint pink kidney beans quart)
1 Bermuda onion, chopped. 1 pint pink kidney beans 1 quart liquid 1/2 cup butter, oil or beef fat 1 button garlic 1 tomato, sliced Soak the beans over night and boil them until tender; mash with potato masher and return to the water in which they were cooked, of which there should be about a quart. Run this purée through a sieve to free it from hulls. Fry the onion and garlic in the fat until brown; adding the tomato. When well cooked strain through a colander; add to the purée; let simmer for ten minutes, and serve.
A plain bean purée thickened only by the beans themselves, with a fried sofrito stirred in at the end. Two things need sorting before you start: the ingredient list omits the onion the method calls for, and it does not say what the "quart liquid" should be.
- The missing onionThe method fries "the onion and garlic" but no onion appears in the list. Use one medium onion, sliced or chopped, with the single clove of garlic (a "button" of garlic is one clove, not a head).
- What the quart of liquid isIt is the water the beans were cooked in, which the recipe expects you to keep: it says to return the mash to "the water in which they were cooked, of which there should be about a quart." Soak a pint of dried beans overnight, then simmer, and add water or stock to bring the cooking liquid back to a quart after mashing.
- QuantitiesA pint of dried pink kidney beans is 2 cups, roughly 13 to 14 oz. Cooked and pureed with a quart of liquid, this gives something like 6 servings as a first course.
- Half a cup of fatThat is 4 oz for six portions, generous by current taste but the source of most of the flavour. Two to three tablespoons of oil or beef fat will brown the aromatics adequately if you want a lighter soup.
- SievingPush the mashed beans through a sieve to remove the skins, as directed; a food mill does this faster. A blender will not separate the hulls, only chop them, which gives a grainier soup.
- Straining the sofritoThe recipe passes the fried onion, garlic and tomato through a colander before adding the result to the puree; how much of the solid matter goes through depends on how hard you press. Leaving them in and blending is the modern alternative.
- Cooking time for the beansSoaked kidney beans take 45 minutes to 1 1/2 hours at a simmer depending on age. They must be fully soft before mashing, and dried kidney beans should be boiled hard for at least ten minutes early in cooking rather than merely warmed through.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified. Salt the beans once they are tender, and finish with pepper; a little vinegar or lemon lifts the flatness of a plain bean puree.
Bean purées like this one are the backbone of cheap soup cookery on both sides of the Atlantic, and the method here — beans boiled, mashed, sieved, then sharpened with fat and aromatics fried separately — is a familiar way of turning a dried legume into something that passes at table as a smooth soup. The fried onion, garlic and tomato strained into the purée is essentially a sofrito, sitting in an American loose-leaf book alongside more Anglo fare. Loose-leaf cook books of this period were sold as binders so that owners could add pages and paste in clippings.