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Bean Soup
Mrs. Whitehead.
One pint beans, four quarts water, small piece fat beef; boil three hours and strain. If too thin add one ; boil three hours and strain. If too thin add one tablespoon flour.
A bare-bones nineteenth-century bean soup: beans, water, a piece of fat beef, long boiling, then straining. It works, but it assumes several things a modern cook has to supply.
- A pint of beansDried beans were measured by volume: a pint is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz to 1 lb. Small white beans such as navy or marrow are the likeliest reading of "beans" in a soup of this kind.
- SoakingThe recipe gives no soaking instruction; period manuals commonly call for an overnight soak, so it may simply have been assumed. Soak 8 hours, or the three-hour boil may still leave the beans firm.
- The fat beef"Small piece fat beef" suggests a fatty cut for flavour and richness rather than for eating — beef shin or brisket trimmings. About 8 oz suits this quantity. Salt pork is a common substitute, though it is not what the recipe calls for; if used, hold back on added salt.
- Four quarts is a lot of waterSixteen cups to one pint of beans. Keep it at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil; a good deal of liquid will cook away over three hours, though how much depends on the pot and the heat.
- Straining"Strain" may mean pressing the beans through a sieve and discarding the skins, as period bean purées were often finished, or merely straining out the solids. If you want the purée, a blender or food mill is quicker, and you can leave some beans whole if you prefer texture.
- The flourDo not tip a tablespoon of dry flour into hot soup. Work it to a paste with a little cold water or soft butter, whisk it in, and simmer several minutes to cook out the raw taste.
- SeasoningNone is listed, which is common in recipes of this kind. Salt, black pepper, and an onion or a bay leaf in the pot bring it closer to modern expectations.
- YieldAbout 2 quarts finished soup, serving six as a first course.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the wave of American charity cookbooks compiled from the receipts of named local women — here Mrs. Whitehead — and sold to raise funds, a format generally traced to the Civil War sanitary fairs of the 1860s. The terseness is characteristic: contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew that beans were soaked overnight and that soup was seasoned to taste, so only the proportions and the timing needed setting down. Dried white beans with a scrap of fat pork or beef were among the cheapest substantial dishes in a nineteenth-century kitchen, keeping indefinitely in the pantry and asking nothing but fuel and time, and versions of this soup appear in nearly every household manual of the period.