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Black Bean Soup
Soak one pint of black beans over night.
The next morning drain and cover with cold water. Add one sliced onion which has been browned in a tablespoon of butter; also two stalks of celery broken into inch pieces. Simmer until beans are soft, adding more water from time to time. Press through a sieve, again bring to the boiling point, and then add seasoning of one-fourth teaspoon of mustard, pepper, salt and paprika to taste. Thicken with one and one-half tablespoons each of butter and flour well blended before adding. This prevents the soup from separating. Cut two hard boiled eggs in thin slices also a lemon and add these to the strained soup just before serving. B
A straightforward purée soup; the only real work is the sieving and the roux at the end. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- QuantitiesOne pint of dry black beans is about 14 oz, or roughly 2 cups — it swells to nearly 6 cups soaked. Expect 6 to 8 servings of thick soup.
- WaterNo amount is given. Cover the soaked beans by 2 inches, about 2 quarts, and top up as it reduces; the soup is thickened later, so the cooking liquid can stay generous.
- Simmering time"Until beans are soft" means 1½ to 2 hours on the stove for soaked black beans. A pressure cooker does it much faster — roughly 8 to 12 minutes at high pressure for beans soaked overnight — which also makes the sieving easier.
- Salt timingThe recipe holds all seasoning until after sieving, which is sensible with older beans — but a modest amount of salt in the cooking water does not toughen beans and improves the flavour throughout.
- The sievePressing through a sieve is the whole texture of the dish: skins and celery fibre stay behind. A food mill or a blender followed by a strainer gets the same result with less labour; skipping the strain leaves a coarser, grittier soup.
- The rouxThe instruction to blend butter and flour before adding is the hinge; the original describes a raw butter-and-flour paste worked smooth, not a cooked roux. Blend the 1½ tablespoons each thoroughly, then whisk in a ladle of hot soup before returning it to the pot, so the flour disperses rather than lumping.
- MustardA quarter teaspoon here almost certainly means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard; prepared mustard would add vinegar and thin the seasoning.
- Egg and lemonAdd the sliced hard-boiled egg and thin lemon slices to the bowls or at the very last moment. Lemon left in hot soup turns bitter from the pith, and the egg breaks up.
Black bean soup finished with hard-boiled egg and lemon appears in American cookery from the late nineteenth century, and it shares the egg-and-lemon garnish with turtle and mock-turtle soup; the idea that it served as an economical stand-in for turtle soup is often repeated, though it is traditional rather than documented. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern and magazine publisher Butterick, and it teaches the puree soup as a system: a legume or vegetable simmered with onion and celery, sieved, then bound with a butter-and-flour roux to keep it from separating in the tureen. The single letter "B" at the end may mark a contributor's initial.