Bean Soup
Two quarts water, and use a smoked ham bone or bacon, 1 pint beans; when cooked add 2 spoons flour and 1 egg stirred together and stir into the soup.
A bare-bones formula of the kind common in community cookbooks, where the writer assumed the reader had made bean soup before. Two details need attention: the bean quantity, which is measured by volume, and the egg-and-flour finish, which is a thickening liaison and will curdle if handled roughly.
- The hinge: adding the eggStir the flour and egg to a smooth paste, then thin it with a ladleful of the hot soup before it goes into the pot. Add it off the boil and keep the soup below a simmer afterwards, or the egg will set into threads instead of thickening the broth.
- "1 pint beans"A pint measured in the kitchen is 2 cups, roughly 14-16 oz of dried beans, which will swell to about 5 cups cooked. Navy, great northern or any small white bean suits the smoked pork; the original does not specify a variety.
- SoakingNot mentioned, but assumed in period practice. Soak overnight in cold water, or bring to a boil and stand off the heat an hour. Unsoaked beans in 2 quarts of water will drink most of it before they soften.
- "Two spoons flour"Read as tablespoons. Two tablespoons of flour with one egg is enough body for two quarts of liquid without making it pasty.
- Cooking timeSoaked beans with a ham bone need 1 1/2 to 2 hours at a bare simmer. Top up with hot water as it reduces; the finished soup should still be loose enough to thicken.
- Smoked ham bone or baconA modern smoked hock or shank end works better than a supermarket ham bone, which is often stripped bare. If using bacon, a thick piece of slab or a couple of ends, browned first, gives the same effect. Pull the meat off, chop it and return it to the pot.
- SaltHold off until the beans are tender and the pork has given up its salt. Smoked cuts vary widely and the soup can easily overshoot.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 quarts once thickened, serving four to six as a main course.
Bean soup thickened with beaten egg and flour belongs to the German and Central European kitchens that shaped much of Midwestern home cooking, where a raw egg stirred into a hot pot at the last moment was one familiar way to give body to a thin broth without cream. Community collections often printed such recipes in shorthand, with little more than the proportions set down. The smoked ham bone points to the same economy: it is the tail end of a cured leg, kept back after the meat was carved, and dried beans were the cheapest thing in the house to build around it. Recipes of this shape appear throughout American community cookbooks, and the combination of pork bone, white beans and a flour-and-egg finish survives in various regional forms to this day.