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Black Bean Soup (Ham bone one pint of black)
A ham bone, one pint of black beans, soaked over night, and boiled slowly until soft enough to be put through a colander; add this pulp to two quarts of water from the boiled ham bone; add one tablespoonful of butter, flavor with juice from one lemon; one tablespoon of sherry wine, and chop up or cut in slices three hard boiled eggs, which place in the tureen before pouring the soup over. soup is spoiled by being made very thick. Serve with croutons.
A straightforward Victorian black bean soup built on ham stock, with the eggs and lemon added at the end rather than cooked in. Two things decide whether it works: the beans must be cooked to collapse before they go through the sieve, and the finished soup must stay thin.
- Keep it looseThe original is emphatic that thickness spoils it, and that is the hinge. Aim for something closer to heavy cream than porridge; if the purée tightens as it sits, thin it with more ham broth rather than water so the seasoning holds.
- A pint of beansDry beans were measured by volume, so this is about 14 oz or 2 cups of dry black turtle beans, yielding roughly 5-6 cups cooked. With two quarts of broth that makes about eight servings.
- Through a colanderHere this meant pressing the softened beans through a perforated sieve with a wooden spoon or pestle, which strains out skins. A food mill gives the same result; a blender or immersion blender is faster but leaves the skins in, so pass it through a mesh strainer afterward if you want the old smooth texture.
- The ham boneModern supermarket ham bones vary wildly in salt. Simmer the bone in unsalted water for 2-3 hours, strain, taste, and salt only at the end after the lemon and sherry have gone in. A smoked ham hock works if no bone is available.
- SoakingOvernight soaking is still worth doing for even cooking, but plan on 1 to 1½ hours of simmering after that, longer for older beans. Hold off on any acid, including the lemon, until the beans are fully soft.
- Lemon and sherry at the endBoth are finishing flavors and both fade with cooking. Stir them in off the heat. Use a dry sherry such as fino or amontillado, not cream sherry.
- The eggsSlice the hard-boiled eggs into warmed bowls and pour the hot soup over, as directed. Simmering them in the soup turns the whites rubbery and clouds the broth.
- CroutonsPeriod croutons were usually small cubes of stale bread fried in butter or fat rather than oven-dried. Fry them in the fat skimmed from the ham broth if you have it.
Black bean soup with lemon, sherry and sliced egg appears in American hotel and club dining, though how early and how widely it spread is not well documented. The black turtle bean itself is a Latin American cultivar that reached North American markets in quantity through Caribbean and Gulf trade. Its appearance in a general household cookbook like this one reflects a thrifty logic as much as a fashionable one: the recipe begins with a ham bone, the leftover of an earlier meal, and turns the water it was boiled in into the body of the soup.