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Cream Soy Bean Soup
1 Cup Green or Yellow Soy Beans 2 Tablespoons Butter 3 Tablespoons Barley Flour 1 Quart Milk 1. Teaspoon Salt 1/8 Teaspoon Pepper 1 Tablespoon Onion Soak beans at least twelve hours.
Cook in water four hours or until tender, then rub them through a sieve. Brown the chopped onion in the butter, add flour, milk and bean pulp. Boil one minute, stirring constantly. Season and serve. -
A plain milk-thickened purée that depends entirely on getting the beans genuinely soft before they meet the milk. Underdone soybeans will not pass a sieve and will stay chalky no matter how long the soup simmers.
- Which soybean"Green or yellow soy beans" here means dried mature beans of either colour, not fresh edamame. Dried soybeans are far denser than navy or kidney beans, which is why the recipe asks for a twelve-hour soak and four hours of boiling; a pressure cooker brings soaked beans to purée-tender in about 35 to 45 minutes.
- If you use frozen shelled edamameSkip the soak entirely and simmer 10 to 15 minutes until soft. The flavour is grassier and sweeter than dried soy, and the soup comes out pale green.
- Barley flourLower in gluten than wheat flour and a somewhat weaker thickener, so the finished soup is light-bodied. Plain all-purpose flour works in the same quantity and gives a slightly thicker result.
- The hinge: do not scorch the milkBean pulp is heavy and sinks, so a quart of milk over direct high heat will catch on the bottom before the one minute of boiling is up. Warm the milk into the roux first, add the pulp off the fiercest heat, and keep the whisk moving.
- SievingA food mill or the coarse disc of a ricer does in two minutes what the sieve does in ten, and a blender is faster still, though it leaves the skins in. Sieving is worth the effort if you want the smooth texture the recipe is after.
- OnionOne tablespoon chopped is only a small piece, perhaps an eighth of a small onion. Brown it gently in the butter rather than colouring it hard, or the soup takes on a scorched note that the mild bean flavour cannot carry.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for six cups of soup is a starting point, not a finish. Soy purée is notably bland and usually wants more salt, and a little nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry is a period-appropriate lift.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the bean pulp makes roughly six cups, or four to six first-course servings.
Soy beans appear in American home cookbooks in the early twentieth century largely as a health food rather than as an Asian ingredient. Agricultural bulletins promoted them as a high-protein field crop, and the vegetarian sanitarium kitchens associated with the Seventh-day Adventist movement pushed soy flour, soy milk and soy purées into general circulation as substitutes for meat and, for diabetics, for starchier beans. The format is entirely conventional for the period, being a standard cream soup in which a vegetable purée is folded into a butter-flour-milk base.