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Black Soy Bean Soup
2 Cups Black Soy Beans 2 Quarts Cold Water 1 Small Onion 2 Small Stalks Celery 1 Teaspoon Salt 1 Lemon 1/8 Teaspoon Pepper 1/4 Teaspoon Mustard 2 Tablespoons Butter 2 Tablespoons Flour 2 Hard Boiled Eggs Soak beans over night. In the morning drain, add celery and cold water. Cook four hours or until tender and rub through a strainer. Cut onion in thin slices and brown slightly in the butter.
Add the flour, seasoning and bean water and pulp. Reheat to boiling, strain and been cut in slices. pour over the egg and lemon which have
A black bean soup in the classic American style — puréed beans, a butter-flour thickening, and slices of lemon and hard-boiled egg in the bowl — but made with black soy beans rather than turtle beans. The final sentence is garbled in the original printing; the sense is that the lemon and egg are sliced into the serving dish and the strained soup poured over them.
- The beans are the sticking pointBlack soy beans (sometimes sold as black edamame or kuromame) are a true soybean, not a black turtle bean, and they stay firm far longer. The four hours is not padding; cook until they crush easily between finger and thumb, or the strainer stage will defeat you.
- Soak and drain, as writtenThe overnight soaking water is discarded and fresh cold water used. Keep to that — it removes some of the oligosaccharides that make soybeans hard going, and the recipe's proportions assume two quarts of clean water.
- Salt lateThe teaspoon of salt is listed with the seasonings that go into the onion-and-butter base, not into the pot at the start. Whether salting the cooking water actually slows the beans is disputed, but following the recipe's own order costs nothing.
- Rubbing through a strainerThis is the labour of the recipe. A blender or food processor does it in a minute; pass the puree through a sieve afterwards anyway, since soybean skins do not break down and will leave the soup gritty.
- Mustard means dry mustardA quarter teaspoon of powdered mustard, stirred into the roux with the salt and pepper. Prepared mustard would throw off both the vinegar balance and the quantity.
- The rouxTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour for two quarts is a light binding, not a thick sauce. Cook the flour in the butter with the onions a minute or two before the bean liquid goes in, or the soup tastes pasty.
- Second strainingAfter reheating to boiling, the soup is strained again — this catches the onion slices and any flour lumps. The onion is there for flavour only and is not meant to be served.
- Assembling the bowlsSlice the lemon and the hard-boiled eggs thin, lay them in the tureen or in individual bowls, and pour the boiling soup over. Do not let the lemon sit in the hot soup for long or it turns bitter from the pith.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two quarts of liquid and two cups of dry beans would suggest roughly six to eight servings as a first course.
Soy beans reached American cookbooks well before they reached American fields in quantity. The USDA imported and trialled dozens of varieties through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; for a good while they were treated as a curiosity crop, grown for forage as often as for the table. What put them into home cookery was the period's interest in vegetable protein — health-reform kitchens, sanitarium cooking and diabetic dietaries all promoted the soy bean as a bean unusually rich in protein and low in starch, and recipes for soy bean soup, soy bean loaf and soy bean coffee circulated in that literature. This soup is those beans dressed in an older and more familiar costume: the lemon-and-hard-boiled-egg garnish, the strained purée, the butter-and-flour binding are all straight from the standard black bean soup of nineteenth-century American cookery, often associated, though without documented proof, with Boston hotel and club cooking. Its appearance in a bride's book — a genre aimed at young women setting up a first household and anxious to be current — suggests the soy bean had by then acquired enough respectability to be offered without apology.