Home › Soups › Pomesarian Soup
Pomesarian Soup
Soak three cupfuls of red kidney beans over night in cold water; drain, cover with fresh boiling water and simmer until very soft. Drain, rub one-half of them through a fine sieve, adding to them gradually equal quantities of stock and the water in which they were boiled until reduced to a thin broth. Add to this a bunch of sweet herbs, salt and pepper; simmer for half an hour. Remove the herbs and add the reserved whole beans. Simmer for fifteen minutes longer and serve with long croutons of fried breads.
A plain purée-and-whole-bean soup of the sort that turned up on winter luncheon menus around 1900. Nothing here has become dangerous; a few of the proportions and timings need a modern reading.
- Quantities and yieldThree cups of dried kidney beans is roughly 1.3 lb and will swell to about 8 cups cooked. With the stock and bean liquor this makes 3 to 4 quarts, or eight to ten servings. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd.
- The soaking step still mattersOvernight in cold water, then draining and starting in fresh boiling water, is not fussiness. Discarding the soaking liquid removes some of the oligosaccharides that make beans hard to digest.
- Kidney beans must be properly boiledRaw and undercooked red kidney beans contain phytohaemagglutinin. A hard boil of at least ten minutes early in cooking destroys it, and the recipe's "simmer until very soft" — an hour to an hour and a half — does the rest. Do not shortcut this in a slow cooker at low temperature.
- "A thin broth"The instruction is to thin the purée gradually with equal parts stock and bean water until it pours easily; how much liquid that takes will depend on how thick the purée is, and it may be several cups. Season only after thinning; the concentrated purée tastes far saltier than the finished soup.
- A bunch of sweet herbsThe period term for a bouquet garni: parsley, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string, sometimes with marjoram or savory. Tie it so it lifts out whole, as the recipe expects you to remove it.
- SievingRubbing half the beans through a fine sieve with a wooden spoon gives a smoother, lighter body than a blender, which tends to make bean purée gluey. A food mill on the fine plate is the closest modern equivalent.
- Long croutons of fried breadFingers of bread, fried in butter or good fat until crisp, and cut to size before frying.
Bean purées served as first courses in late-Victorian and Edwardian household cookery, valued because dried beans were cheap, kept indefinitely, and gave a soup with body without meat. The name in this book is a puzzle: "Pomesarian" appears in no standard culinary glossary and may be a compositor's mangling — Pomeranian has been suggested, the northern German region having a long association with dried-bean and pea cookery — though that reading is speculation rather than anything documented. Compilers of the period borrowed freely from one another and from hotel menus, and grand-sounding continental names attached themselves to homely dishes with little regard for accuracy. The two-part method here, half the beans sieved for the body and half left whole for texture, has parallels in French purées and in the potages of hotel kitchens of the same decades.