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Baked-Bean Soup
3 slices bacon 2 cups baked beans 4 cups cold water 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter or butter substitute Salt, pepper, paprika Cook bacon. Add to beans. Add cold water and cook until beans are soft, then rub through a strainer. Place on the fire and add a little more water, if needed, as the soup must not be too thick. Bind with the flour and butter. Cook two or three minutes. Season with salt, a dash of pepper, and paprika.
A thrifty second-day soup built on leftover baked beans. The recipe assumes you know how to make a roux-style binding and gives no yield.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Two cups of beans and four cups of water, plus whatever extra water the soup needs, will give something in the region of five to six cups — roughly four modest first-course servings.
- The beans"Baked beans" here means the sweet, salt-pork-and-molasses navy beans of a New England bean pot, not a plain cooked bean. Canned baked beans work; drain off most of the sauce or the soup will be cloyingly sweet, and hold back the salt until you have tasted it.
- Cook baconRender three slices slowly until crisp and add them to the beans. The recipe does not say what to do with the fat; adding it along with the meat carries most of the flavour, but that is a choice, not an instruction.
- StrainingA sieve and wooden spoon give a smoother, less starchy result than a blender, which can turn bean purée gluey. If you use a blender, pulse briefly and then sieve to catch the skins.
- BindingThe recipe says only to bind with the flour and butter. Working them together into a pale roux first, then whisking in a ladle of the hot soup before returning it to the pot, avoids lumps; stirred in raw, flour tends to lump. The recipe's two or three minutes of cooking is short, and a little longer will do no harm.
- ConsistencyBean purée thickens sharply as it cools and again on standing, so keep it looser than seems right and thin with water or stock at the last moment.
- Butter substituteIn 1929 this meant margarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter is fine; so is a spoonful of the reserved bacon fat, which reinforces the smoke.