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Baked-Bean Soup
3 slices bacon
1 tablespoon butter or butter
2 cups baked beans substitute
4 cups cold water
Salt, pepper, paprika
1 tablespoon flour
Cook bacon. Add to beans. Add cold water and cook until beans are soft, then rub through a strainer. Place on the fire and add a little more water, if needed, as the soup must not be too thick. Bind with the flour and butter. Cook two or three minutes. Season with salt, a dash of pepper, and paprika.
A thrift soup built on leftover baked beans, molasses and all. The ingredient list was set in two columns and has run together in transcription: read it as 3 slices bacon, 1 tablespoon butter or butter substitute, 2 cups baked beans, 4 cups cold water, 1 tablespoon flour, and salt, pepper and paprika.
- The beans decide everythingThis is a leftover recipe, and the seasoning of the original beans carries the soup. New England-style beans with molasses and salt pork give something sweet and dark; plain canned beans in tomato sauce give a thinner, tangier result. Taste before salting, since baked beans are already seasoned and the bacon adds more.
- "Butter substitute"In this period the phrase meant oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening, sold as an economy in place of dairy butter. Either butter or a neutral fat works; the tablespoon exists only to make the flour binding, so bacon fat left in the pan does the job as well.
- Cook baconRender the slices until crisp in the soup pot, then chop or crumble them into the beans. The fat should stay in the pot. The recipe does not say whether the bacon goes through the strainer; putting it through gives a smoother, smokier soup, holding some back gives a garnish.
- Rubbing through a strainerThe period method is to press the softened beans through a fine sieve with a wooden spoon or pestle, which removes the skins. A food mill with the medium plate does the same work in a minute. A blender will not remove the skins, so pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the smooth texture the recipe intends.
- Binding with flour and butterMash the tablespoon of flour into the tablespoon of soft butter to make a paste, whisk it into the simmering soup, and cook two or three minutes so the raw flour taste goes. Adding dry flour straight to hot liquid will give lumps.
- ConsistencyThe instruction to thin with more water is the one that needs attention. Puréed baked beans thicken sharply as they sit and again as the flour cooks, so hold back some water and adjust at the end; aim for something that coats a spoon but still pours.
- TimingBeans that are already baked need only 20 to 30 minutes at a simmer to fall apart in the water. There is nothing to gain from longer cooking.
- YieldRoughly five to six cups finished, depending on how much extra water is added at the end.
Butterick built its name on dress patterns, and its household books were sold to the same readers who bought them: women running homes on a budget, for whom a recipe that turned Saturday night's beans into Sunday's soup was practical advice rather than nostalgia. Baked-bean soup appears in a great many American cookbooks between the 1880s and the 1930s, often in something like this form -- leftover beans, water, a thickening of flour and fat, pushed through a sieve -- though versions built on stock, tomato, onion or celery are common too, and it belongs to the same pur uée tradition that produced pea and lentil soups in the soup chapters of the period, when a sieved legume soup was the standard economical first course. The paprika may be a small period marker, and it would have given as much color to a drab bowl as flavor.