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Black Bean Soup
I PINT BLACK BEANS 2 QUARTS WATER I ONION 2 TABLESPOONS BUTTER I TABLESPOON FLOUR HAM OR BEEF WATER 1/2 CUP SHERRY 2 HARD-COOKED EGGS, SLICED I LEMON SLICED Soak beans overnight in cold water and drain in morning. Cover with water and put over low heat to boil slowly. Slice onion, fry light brown in 1 tablespoon butter and add to beans. Simmer 3-4 hours, or until beans are tender, adding a little cold water if they boil too hard. When soft, rub beans through strainer, reheat and thicken with flour and 1 tablespoon butter heated and stirred together. Now add enough water in which a bit of corned beef or ham has been cooked to make 2 quarts of soup. This will give a better savor than broth from cubes. Add wine or leave it out, and pour soup over slices of egg and lemon in each plate.
A straightforward black bean purée in the old style, thickened with a butter-flour roux and finished with sherry, egg and lemon at the table. The ingredient list gives no salt because the salt arrives with the ham or corned-beef water.
- The hinge is the cooking liquidThe beans are simmered in water with a browned onion, and the salt and savour arrive only at the end, from the liquor a piece of ham or corned beef was boiled in. If you have no such liquor, use a good unsalted stock with a ham hock simmered in it, and salt to taste at the finish rather than relying on bouillon cubes.
- A pint of beansDry beans were measured by volume: 1 pint is 2 cups, roughly 14 oz by weight. With the added meat water this makes up the stated 2 quarts of finished soup, serving six to eight.
- Soaking and simmer timeOvernight soaking still works, and the 3-4 hour simmer reflects beans of unknown age. Modern packaged black beans are usually tender in 1 1/2 to 2 hours; start checking at 90 minutes.
- \"Rub through a strainer\"This is the step a food mill or blender replaces. A mill or sieve gives the smooth, skin-free texture intended; a stick blender leaves the skins in, which is acceptable but a coarser soup.
- The roux1 tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together is a very light thickening for 2 quarts. Cook it a minute or two before adding it to the hot bean purée so it does not taste raw, and expect a soup that is thick from the beans themselves rather than from flour.
- The sherryHalf a cup of sherry into 2 quarts is assertive by current taste. Add it off the heat at the end, a little at a time; dry or medium sherry, not \"cooking sherry,\" which is salted.
- Egg and lemonSlice the hard-cooked eggs and lemon and lay them in the bowls before ladling, as written. The lemon can be squeezed into the soup, and the acid cuts the heaviness of the purée.
- Cooking outdoorsOn a fire, the long simmer wants the pot off to one side over low coals rather than over flame; the recipe's instruction to add a little cold water if the beans boil too hard is a general heat-control measure.
Black bean soup finished with sherry, sliced hard-cooked egg and lemon was a fixture of nineteenth-century American hotel and restaurant cookery, and a version of it appears in the Boston Cooking-School tradition. The pattern is older than any single restaurant: a dried-legume purée sieved smooth, seasoned with the water from boiled salt meat, and brightened at the table with acid and egg. Dried beans keep indefinitely, need no ice, and reward the kind of long unattended simmer a campfire or a stove at the back of a cabin can supply. The insistence that ham water "will give a better savor than broth from cubes" suggests a text written when bouillon cubes were common enough to need arguing against.