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Black Bean Soup (Pick over wash and soak over)
Pick over, wash and soak over night one pint of black beans. In the morning drain them, add two quarts of fresh cold water and a bouquet of sweet herbs and place at the side of the fire to simmer very gently until they break in pieces. When half done add one good sized onion roasted in a slow oven until all browned through, one-half of a medium sized carrot cut fine and browned in a little butter or fat, one scant teaspoonful of salt, three cloves and a dozen peppercorns. When very tender rub through a fine sieve and return to the fire. If the pulp is very thick add sufficient brown stock to reduce to a creamy consistence. Taste and add seasoning as necessary. Cook together until browned one tablespoonful each of butter and flour, dilute smoothly with some of the soup, then turn into the kettle and stir until well mixed. Simmer ten minutes longer. Place in the hot soup tureen some thin slices of lemon, quarters of hard boiled egg and (if used) four tablespoonfuls sherry, fill with the soup and send to the table.
A purée-style bean soup finished in the manner of nineteenth-century turtle soup, with lemon, hard-boiled egg and sherry added in the tureen rather than the pot. The instructions are sound; only the vessels and the heat sources need translating.
- One pint of black beansDry beans were measured by volume: a pint is about 2 cups, roughly 14 oz, which swells to some 5 cups soaked. With two quarts of water this yields about 6 servings of finished soup.
- "At the side of the fire"This means a very low, barely trembling simmer on the cool edge of a range, not a boil. On a modern burner use the lowest setting with the lid ajar; the beans need 1.5 to 2.5 hours to break down, longer if they are old.
- Roasted onion is the flavour hingeThe whole onion browned through in a slow oven (period "slow" is roughly 250-325F; give it an hour or more) is what gives the soup its dark, almost meaty depth. Sautéing it instead will produce a perfectly nice bean soup and not this one.
- Bouquet of sweet herbs"Sweet herbs" was a loose period category; a tied bundle of parsley, thyme and a bay leaf is a reasonable rendering. Tie the cloves and peppercorns into the same bundle or a bit of cheesecloth so they can be pulled before sieving.
- Rub through a fine sieveA food mill or blender does this in seconds, but pass the result through a sieve afterward regardless. Black bean skins are tough and will not break down in the purée.
- Brown stockA dark veal or beef stock, roasted bones and all. Any good unsalted beef stock works; add it a little at a time, since the purée thickens further as it sits.
- The browned rouxCook the butter and flour to a nut-brown colour, not blond, and slacken it with hot soup before it goes into the kettle. The ten-minute simmer afterward is there to cook out the flour taste and should not be shortened.
- Sherry and saltAdd the sherry in the tureen, off the heat, as directed; boiling it away loses the point. The single scant teaspoon of salt is light for the volume, and the recipe itself says to taste and add seasoning as necessary.
This soup belongs to a long American line of dishes meant to recall turtle soup without the turtle. The lemon slices, quartered hard-boiled egg and spoonfuls of sherry are the garnish that cookbooks of the period commonly prescribe for green turtle and mock turtle soup, and their appearance over a purée of black beans is the tell. Black bean soup in this dressed-up form is usually associated with the hotel and club kitchens of the eastern seaboard in the later nineteenth century, where it turns up on printed menus; the version with the roasted onion and browned roux is the sort of careful, French-influenced work that turn-of-the-century household manuals like this one were trying to bring into ordinary kitchens. The dried black turtle bean itself came north from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the origin of its common name is unclear -- it does not appear to derive from the soup's turtle pretensions, though the coincidence has served the dish well.