Bean Soup
2 cups beans 2 tablespoons finely cut onion 2 tablespoons finely cut bacon 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons chopped parsley 1 teaspoon thyme 3 tablespoons flour Soak beans in water over night. Drain and put into saucepan with six cups boiling water and boil slowly two hours or until soft; add onion and bacon which have been fried light brown; boil five minutes; add salt, pepper, parsley and thyme. It is well to mash beans with back of spoon. Add flour which has been mixed with a little cold water; boil five minutes and serve.
A plain white-bean soup of the kind that appeared in nearly every American cookbook of the era: dried beans, a little bacon and onion for fat and savour, and a flour slurry to pull the broth together. Two adjustments matter most — enough water, and salt late rather than early.
- The beans"2 cups beans" means dried beans, most likely navy or another small white variety; that is roughly 14 oz and will yield about 5 cups cooked. Soak overnight in water to cover by three inches, then drain and discard the soaking water.
- Water and the lidSix cups of boiling water over two hours of open simmering will reduce a long way. Keep the pot partly covered and add hot water as needed to keep the beans submerged, or you will be thickening a paste rather than a soup.
- Cooking time is a range, not a ruleTwo hours suits older or long-stored beans. Fresh-crop dried beans can be tender in 45 to 60 minutes, so start tasting early — the recipe's own "or until soft" is the real instruction.
- Salt at the end, as writtenThe original adds salt after the beans are soft. Whether salt itself slows softening is disputed; hard water is the better-documented culprit, and some modern testing finds salted water makes no difference or even improves the skins. One teaspoon for six cups of liquid is modest; season again before serving.
- The thymeA teaspoon of thyme means dried leaf here, which is assertive. If using fresh, use about a tablespoon of chopped leaves, and add it with the parsley at the end so it does not turn bitter.
- Bacon and onionFry the two tablespoons of chopped bacon until the fat renders, then soften the onion in it — "light brown," not dark. Tip the fat in with the solids; it is most of the richness in the pot.
- The flour slurryWhisk the 3 tablespoons flour into about 1/3 cup cold water until smooth before it goes near the pot, then stir it in steadily. Five minutes at a simmer is the minimum to cook out the raw-flour taste; stir the bottom, since a floured bean soup scorches easily.
- MashingThe instruction to mash with the back of a spoon is what gives the soup body. Crushing perhaps a third of the beans against the side of the pan gives a better texture than blending the lot smooth.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts, serving six as a first course or four as a main with bread.
Dried-bean soup thickened with a flour-and-water paste and flavoured with a scrap of salt pork or bacon is a long-standing item in the American home kitchen, generally traced to European peasant cookery and sustained here by the fact that dried beans kept indefinitely and cost almost nothing. Its presence in a promotional cookbook of this type — the New Royal Cook Book was published by the makers of Royal Baking Powder to put their product in home kitchens — is of a piece with the everyday dishes such books carried alongside their branded cake and biscuit recipes, dishes that needed no branded ingredient at all. The seasoning here, parsley and thyme rather than the smoked ham hock of Southern versions or the cumin of the Southwest, points to the plain Anglo-American style that these mass-circulation booklets treated as the national default.