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Turtle Bean Soup
Mrs. A. N. Arnold.
Take a quart of black beans, wash them and put them in a pot with three quarts of water; boil until thoroughly soft; rub the pulp through a colander and return it to the pot; add some thyme in a clean cloth, and let it boil a few minutes for flavour; slice some hard boiled eggs and drop them into the soup; add a little butter, pepper and salt.
A plain purée of black beans dressed up to resemble the far costlier real turtle soup. The recipe assumes you will judge doneness and seasoning yourself, so a few notes on quantities and method.
- Turtle beans are black beans"Turtle bean" was the ordinary nineteenth-century market name for the black turtle bean, still sold as black beans. Nothing in this soup comes from a turtle.
- A quart of dry beans is a lotA quart measure of dry black beans is roughly 1.75 to 2 lb, which will give something like 8 to 10 generous servings. Halve the recipe unless you are feeding a crowd.
- Soak firstModern dried beans may be old and slow to soften. Soak them overnight, or bring to a boil and stand off the heat an hour, then cook in fresh water.
- Water and timeThree quarts to two pounds of beans is tight; keep a kettle going and top up so the beans stay covered. Reckon on 1.5 to 2 hours at a bare simmer for beans soft enough to pass through a sieve, longer if they are old.
- The colander stageRubbing through a colander with a wooden spoon works, but a food mill or a coarse sieve is faster and holds back the skins, which is the point of the operation. A blender leaves the skins in and gives a grittier soup, so pass it afterwards if you go that route.
- Thyme in a clothA herb bag: a few sprigs tied in a clean cloth so they can be lifted out. A few minutes is right; long boiling can make thyme bitter.
- The eggs are the disguiseThe eggs -- sliced or quartered hard-boiled egg was probably an imitative touch rather than a flavouring. Add them at the last moment off the heat; held in hot soup the whites toughen and the yolks crumble and cloud it.
- Season assertivelyWith no stock or ham bone, the soup leans largely on salt, pepper and butter. Salt only after the beans are soft, and taste twice -- bean purée absorbs a surprising amount. Sherry or lemon was a common period finish for turtle and mock turtle soups.
Real turtle soup, made from green sea turtle, was one of the great luxury dishes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is precisely why cheaper stand-ins multiplied: mock turtle from a calf's head, and this thriftier still bean version, which borrows the name from the bean rather than the reptile. The hard-boiled egg sliced into the pot looks like an imitative touch, and egg in some form does appear in mock turtle recipes of the period. Green sea turtles are now protected, so the bean version has outlived the dish it imitated.