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Puree of Beans, Honolulu
Soak one pint red beans in cold water over night, drain, place them in a soup pot with two-ounce piece each salt pork and lean raw ham, a sliced carrot, sliced onion, two each sliced leeks and branches celery, two branches each parsley and chervil and one bean garlic. Moisten with half gill red wine and four quarts water, season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, adding half an ounce good butter, cover pot and let gently boil for two hours. Remove seeds and peel a pound piece of pumpkin, then cut it in small pieces, add to soup and let boil for thirty-five minutes more. Strain soup through sieve into a basin, then through Chinese strainer into a saucepan, add a half pint milk, half ounce butter, mix on fire until it comes to a boil, pour into soup tureen and serve with a plate of bread croutons separately.
A long-simmered bean purée thickened with pumpkin rather than flour. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures and vessels need translating.
- Half gill of wineA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is about 1/4 cup (60 ml). It is a seasoning here, not a braising liquid.
- A pint of beansDry beans were measured by volume: one pint is roughly 14 oz / 400 g of red beans. After an overnight soak they will roughly double.
- "One bean garlic"Probably a literal rendering of the French une gousse d'ail; either way, a single clove, not a head.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Pass the soup through the coarse sieve first to catch the pork, ham and vegetable debris, then through the chinois with a ladle to get the velvet texture the recipe is after.
- The pumpkin is the thickenerThe pumpkin adds body -- A pound of pumpkin added for the last thirty-five minutes breaks down and, with the sieved beans, gives the purée its body. Use a dense winter squash — kabocha, crown prince, butternut — rather than the watery field pumpkin sold for carving.
- ChervilRarely stocked; it is delicate and anise-scented, and its flavour largely cooks away over two hours anyway. Flat-leaf parsley with a little tarragon is a common substitute.
- Salt pork and hamTwo ounces of each, in a piece so it can be lifted out at the end. Cured pork varies a good deal in saltiness, so hold back the teaspoon of salt until you taste at the end.
- FinishingThe half pint of milk and butter go in at the last moment and the soup is brought only to a boil, then served. Do not reduce it afterwards or the milk will catch.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Four quarts of water, less what evaporates from a covered pot over two and a half hours, plus the added milk, comes to something in the region of eight to ten servings.
The title is a period convention rather than a claim of Hawaiian origin: grand-hotel and steamship cooking of the 1900s attached place names to standard preparations to signal the reach of the kitchen. Underneath the name this is straightforward French technique — a purée de haricots rouges built on a pork-and-aromatic base, sieved twice and finished with milk and butter. The pumpkin does the work that a liaison of flour or rice would do in a Paris kitchen; squash was cheap and abundant across the islands and the Caribbean. Chervil and leeks in the same pot as salt pork and ham place the recipe in the hotel repertoire of its day, where a soup was expected to be strained until it was smooth and served with croutons passed separately.