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Plain Bean Soup
Soak a quart of white navy beans overnight. In morning drain, cover with fresh water, put over heat, and cook until skins are ready to slip off, then throw beans into cold water, rub well and skins will rise to top, where they may be removed. Cover beans with 2 quarts cold water and boil until very soft. Beat soup until creamy, season to taste with salt, pepper, and butter; and reheat. Freshly heated puffed wheat or hot buttered popcorn is just the stuff to toss on top of each bowl. Or try popped wild rice for a pleasing change.
Beans, split peas and lentils are put up with noodles and other soup mixes in cellophane packages under fancy names like Caruso and Soup's-on. They're as useful as bouillon cubes, of which Herbox is a tasty kind with some green stuff in it, and all sorts of sausages for cooking with them to give taste. German hikers started the making of compressed soups to take along on hikes and called them Erbwurst, herb sausages.
A camp-kitchen bean soup that leans on a step most modern cooks skip: slipping the skins off before the final boil. That is what makes the finished soup smooth rather than grainy.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of dry navy beans is roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb, which cooks up to a very large pot — perhaps 10 to 12 servings. Halve it for a household of four.
- Water is short as writtenTwo quarts of water over two pounds of soaked beans gives a purée, not a soup. Keep a kettle of hot water beside the pot and add as it thickens; expect to use 3 to 4 quarts total.
- The skinning stepCook only until the skins loosen, then shock in cold water and rub the beans between your palms — the skins float and can be poured off. Skip it if you like, but the soup will be noticeably coarser and no amount of beating will fix that.
- Salt at the endThe recipe seasons only after the beans are soft. Salting early is traditionally said to slow softening, though it is hard water (calcium) and acid that are known to keep bean skins firm, and this soup depends on beans that collapse completely.
- "Beat soup until creamy"An immersion blender does in thirty seconds what a wooden spoon or potato masher was meant to do. Leave a ladleful of whole beans aside and stir it back in for texture.
- Butter as seasoningButter here is a seasoning rather than a cooking fat: two to four tablespoons stirred into the hot purée. The recipe adds it before reheating, so warm the soup through gently rather than boiling it hard.
- The toppingsPuffed wheat and buttered popcorn stand in for croutons. Popped wild rice means whole grains dropped into a hot dry pan or a little hot fat until they burst — a small handful at a time, or they scorch.
- Brands that have moved onCaruso and Soup's-on soup mixes are no longer to be found; Herbox bouillon is still sold. Any dried soup mix or bouillon cube substitutes directly.
Bean soup with the skins rubbed off is old thrift cooking — beans were cheap, and the extra labour bought a texture that otherwise took a sieve or a food mill nobody carried to camp. The closing note is worth correcting: the German trail food is Erbswurst, from Erbse, pea, so it is pea sausage rather than herb sausage. It was a compressed cylinder of pea flour, fat and seasoning wrapped in sausage casing, credited to the Berlin cook Johann Heinrich Grüneberg in the 1860s, taken up by the Prussian army as field rations around the Franco-Prussian War before it became a hiker's staple; Knorr kept it in production until 2018. Its appearance in an American outdoor cookbook alongside cellophane-packed bean and lentil mixes sits at the point where packaged dry soup had become ordinary grocery stock.