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Turtle Bean Soup
Soak one pint black beans over night, then put them into three quarts water with beef bones or a small piece of lean salt pork, boil three or four hours, strain, season with salt, pepper, cloves and lemon juice. Put in a few slices of lemon, and if wished add slices of hard-boiled eggs. Serve with toasted bread cut into dice and placed in the tureen. - Mrs. H. C. Clark,
A straightforward black bean soup dressed up to imitate turtle soup. The only real technique is the straining, which is what separates this from a bowl of beans.
- "Turtle bean"An old American name for the black turtle bean, still sold as black beans. No turtle is involved; the name is often linked to the soup the bean was used to counterfeit, though the shell-like look of the bean is also offered as the source.
- QuantitiesOne pint of dry beans is about 14 oz, or a scant 2 cups. Three quarts of water is 12 cups, and the long boil will reduce that considerably; top up with hot water if it drops below a soupy consistency.
- The hinge is the strainerPress the cooked beans through a sieve or food mill rather than simply pouring off the liquid, or you throw away the body of the soup. A blender does it faster, though the skins stay in unless you sieve afterward.
- Salt pork and saltSalt pork or a salted beef bone will season the pot on its own. Wait until after straining to add salt, since the reduction concentrates whatever the pork gave up.
- ClovesUse two or three whole cloves in the pot, or the barest pinch of ground, and fish them out. Clove dominates a bean puree very quickly.
- Cooking timeThree to four hours suits an old soaked bean over a slow fire. Modern beans on a decent burner are usually soft in 90 minutes to two hours; a pressure cooker does it in well under half an hour.
- Lemon and eggThe lemon juice goes in off the heat, at the end. Sliced lemon and hard-boiled egg are the traditional mock-turtle garnish and belong in the bowl, not simmered in the pot.
- YieldAbout 3 quarts before reduction, so six to eight servings. The croutons go into the tureen dry so they hold their shape for a minute or two.
Turtle soup was a luxury of nineteenth-century American dining, and a great deal of ingenuity went into imitating it cheaply: mock turtle from a calf's head, and this bean version, which leans on the black bean's dark, slightly gelatinous broth. The lemon slices and sliced hard-boiled egg are the giveaway, since those were a standard garnish for real green turtle soup and serve here as a visual quotation. The black bean itself is a Latin American crop that reached North American tables through Caribbean trade, and its common name, "turtle bean," is often traced to exactly this use. That the recipe appears under a contributor's name suggests it was a familiar company dish rather than an exotic one, a way to put something that read as grand on the table using beans, a bone, and a lemon.