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Pepper (Put beans water onion)
Put beans, water, onion, and celery in saucepan; bring to boiling-point and simmer thirty minutes. Rub through a sieve, add tomato, and Chili sauce, season to taste with salt and pepper, and bind with the butter and flour cooked together. Serve with Crisp Crackers.
The ingredient list has been lost from this entry, so the quantities below are missing entirely — treat the text as a method rather than a working formula. A few points make it usable alongside a modern bean soup recipe.
- No quantities surviveEntries of this type normally carried a separate list of ingredients, and none is reproduced here, so proportions of beans, water, onion, celery, tomato and chili sauce are unknown. Roughly two cups of cooked beans to a quart of water is a serviceable modern guess, not a reconstruction of the original.
- Thirty minutes means cooked beansDried beans will not soften in half an hour, so the timing implies beans already cooked soft, whether canned or soaked and boiled beforehand. Dried beans from scratch need soaking plus one to two hours of simmering.
- Chili sauce is not hot sauceIn American cookbooks of this period Chili sauce means a thick, sweet-sour tomato relish with onion, vinegar and mild spice — closer to a coarse ketchup than to anything fiery. A couple of tablespoons is a seasoning, not a heat source.
- Rubbing through a sieveThis is the pre-blender purée. A food mill gives the same texture with less work; a blender or stick blender gives a smoother result, though the bean skins will stay in unless you sieve afterward.
- Binding with butter and flourEqual parts by volume, cooked together in a small pan until it smells nutty but takes no colour, then whisked into the hot soup. About two tablespoons of each will thicken a quart. Simmer a few minutes after adding or the flour tastes raw.
- Soups without stockRecipes of this kind belong with soups built on water rather than broth, which is why the seasoning leans on tomato and chili sauce for depth. Vegetable stock in place of the water is an easy improvement and not against the spirit of the thing.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book devotes a whole chapter to soups made without stock, a practical concession to households that did not keep a stockpot simmering and could not spare the meat. Purées of dried legumes — bean, pea, lentil — appear in that chapter alongside milk- and vegetable-based soups, since they thicken themselves and cost almost nothing. The finishing roux of butter and flour, worked in at the end rather than at the start, is often said to be characteristic of the period: thickening was treated as a correction to consistency, applied once the cook could see what the soup actually needed.