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Baked Bean Soup
One pint baked beans, 1 quart boiling water, 1/2 can tomatoes, 1 good sized onion, cut up; cook 2 or 3 hours, put through sieve and put back in pan with about 1 qt. milk; pepper and salt. (Copied.)
A leftover-beans soup from a church fundraising cookbook, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you had a crock of baked beans in the pantry. It works, but the timings and proportions want adjusting.
- Add the milk off the boilThis is the hinge. A quart of milk poured into a hot, acidic tomato-and-bean puree will curdle if it is then boiled. Warm the milk separately, stir it into the puree over low heat, and take it no higher than a bare steam.
- Start with real baked beansA pint is roughly two cups, and the recipe presumes a crock of home-baked beans, which in this period usually meant salt pork and molasses. Canned baked beans work but are considerably sweeter; taste before adding any sugar-adjacent seasoning, and expect to lean harder on salt and pepper.
- Half a can of tomatoesCanned tomatoes of the period commonly ran near the No. 2 size, about 20 fl oz, which would make half a can roughly a cup and a quarter of tomatoes with juice. A modern 14.5 oz can, used whole, is in the same range.
- Two or three hours is far too longTwo or three hours is longer than needed -- Beans that are already baked need only 30 to 45 minutes of simmering to soften the onion and marry the tomato. Longer mainly risks scorching the bottom and cooking off the liquid.
- Sieve, blender, or bothA food mill or blender does in a minute what the sieve did in ten. If you want the smooth texture the original intended, pass the puree through a fine strainer afterward to catch bean skins and tomato seeds.
- ConsistencyA quart of water plus a quart of milk to two cups of beans gives a thin soup. Hold back some of the milk and add it to taste; the puree thickens noticeably as it stands.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts, serving six to eight as a first course. It reheats well but will need thinning and a fresh check for salt.
Baked bean soup is a thrift dish of the northern United States, where a Saturday-night pot of beans was standard and Monday needed something to do with what was left; pur ing them with tomato and milk turns a hard, sweet leftover into something that reads as a proper cream soup. Its appearance in a Philathea class cookbook, produced by the young women's arm of an adult Sunday-school movement that spread widely in the early twentieth century, fits the genre exactly: cheap, filling, made from what was already in the house, and suitable for feeding a crowd at a church supper.