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Black Bean Soup (Ham bone or one quart of rich)
A ham bone, or one quart of rich stock, one quart of black beans, soaked over night and drained; one onion, chopped fine, juice of one lemon. Pepper, salt and Worcestershire sauce to taste. If ham bone is used, boil bone beans and onions together six hours, strain and add. Siice lemon, and put on top when served.
A late-Victorian hotel-style bean soup, written in the compressed shorthand of its day. Two things need attention before you start: the quantity, and the six hours.
- QuantityOne quart of dried black beans is roughly 1¾ lb, and will yield something close to a gallon of finished soup — 10 or more generous servings. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd or want a week of leftovers.
- Six hours is a period figureOvernight-soaked black beans on a modern burner are tender in 1 to 1.5 hours at a bare simmer, or 10 to 15 minutes at pressure. The long boil reflects the slower, less controllable ranges of the period; the beans do not benefit from it.
- "Strain and add"The sentence is elliptical as printed. It most likely means to strain the cooked beans, discard the bone, and add the lemon juice, pepper, salt and Worcestershire to what remains; if you want the smooth purée the period expected, press the solids through a sieve, or use a blender.
- The lemon appears twiceThe juice goes into the soup at the end, off the heat, and a separate lemon is sliced thin for the top of each bowl. Buy two.
- Salt lastA ham bone can carry a great deal of salt and there is more in the Worcestershire. Season only after straining, when you know what the bone has given you.
- If you use stock insteadOne quart of stock will not cover a quart of beans. Add water to keep the beans submerged by an inch or two throughout cooking, and expect a milder soup — the ham bone version is the more characterful of the two.
- ConsistencyPeriod black bean soup was thick, smooth and nearly opaque. Thin the purée with the reserved cooking liquid rather than water so you do not wash out the flavour.
- Traditional finishBlack bean soup of this type was commonly served with dry sherry stirred in at table and a slice of hard-boiled egg alongside the lemon. Neither is in the text, both are in keeping.
Black bean soup became a fixture of American hotel and club dining rooms in the later nineteenth century, and its familiar dress — a smooth dark purée, a float of thin-sliced lemon, often sherry and chopped egg — was well established by the time books like this one printed it. The turtle bean itself is a New World crop, and the soup is generally traced to Caribbean and Latin American bean pottages that reached the eastern seaboard through trade, though by the time it entered books like this one it had been thoroughly assimilated into the Anglo-American repertoire of thick strained soups. The ham bone suggests a household rather than a restaurant setting: a dish built around the remains of a baked ham, which is why the alternative offered is a quart of stock rather than fresh meat. The lemon is not decoration. Acid cuts the heaviness of a long-cooked bean purée, and the finish of citrus and sherry is what set this soup apart from plainer bean porridges.