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Black Bean Soup
The night before the soup is desired, soak the beans in some water, and on the following morning drain off the beans and place in a saucepan with some fresh water. When boiling, remove to one side of the fire and let them simmer for six hours. Put in with the beans a bunch of sweet herb, one large onion, a slice of carrot and turnip and a stalk or two of celery, all of which have been finely chopped and fried in butter. Add a little whole allspice, cloves, mace and cinnamon, and pour in some of the stock. Put a lump of butter and an equal quantity of flour on a saucepan and stir over the fire till brown, then stir it into the soup and keep it simmering for an hour. Place some sliced lemon in a soup-tureen, pour in the soup through a fine hair sieve and serve with a dish of egg-balls.
Oscar gives proportions for almost nothing, which was normal for a chef writing for other cooks. The framework is sound; you supply the numbers.
- Working quantitiesFor six to eight servings, start with 1 lb dried black turtle beans and about 3 quarts of liquid — half water, half beef or veal stock. The "pour in some of the stock" step means the beans should stay well covered throughout.
- Six hours is for an open hearthSix hours is for a slow fire -- That timing assumes a pot at the side of a range at a bare tremble. On a modern burner, soaked black beans are tender in 1½ to 2 hours at a gentle simmer, or roughly 10 minutes at pressure. Cook until they collapse under a spoon; past that you are only losing water.
- Sweet herbsA period bouquet: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf and marjoram, tied with string or in cheesecloth so it can be pulled before sieving.
- The whole spicesAllspice, cloves, mace and cinnamon are what separate this from a modern black bean soup. Keep them restrained — roughly 6 allspice berries, 4 cloves, a blade of mace and a small piece of cinnamon stick — and tie them with the herbs. Loose in the pot they will clog the sieve.
- Brown roux"A lump of butter and an equal quantity of flour": the book does not say whether that is equal by weight or by volume, and either works here — 3 tablespoons of each is right for this pot. Cook it to the colour of a hazelnut before it goes in, and whisk it into hot soup off the boil to avoid lumps.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh conical strainer does the same job. Push the solids through with a ladle rather than straining them out — the pulp is the body of the soup. A blender first, then the sieve, gets you there faster.
- Egg-ballsA nineteenth-century garnish, sent to table here in a dish of their own: hard-boiled yolks mashed with a little raw yolk, flour, salt and cayenne, rolled pea-sized and poached or fried. Sliced hard-boiled egg is the usual modern substitute.
- Lemon, and the missing wineThe lemon in the tureen is doing work rather than decorating — the acid cuts a soup that is otherwise heavy and sweet with spice. Madeira or dry sherry was a common finish for soups of this kind in the period, though this recipe calls for none; add it off the heat if you want that effect.
Black bean soup with lemon and hard-boiled egg is an American hotel and club dish, associated particularly with Boston, and it was appearing on grand New York menus around the time Oscar Tschirky's book was published in 1896. The spicing — allspice, clove, mace, cinnamon — recalls English mock turtle soup, where the same warm spices, lemon slices and forcemeat or egg-balls stood in for the flavour and texture of real turtle. Black turtle beans, cheap and dark and thick when cooked down, made a convincing and much less expensive body for that same profile, and the name of the bean may have helped the association along. Oscar's version is the hotel kitchen's: a long, unattended simmer, a browned roux for body and gloss, everything passed through a hair sieve.