The soup consists of 7 ingredients (Navy Beans, onion, unsalted butter, a smoked ham hock, water, salt and black pepper). Preparing the recipe takes a bit of foresight as the beans must soak overnight in water.
Once thoroughly soaked, I gave the beans a good draining and tossed them into my dutch oven with 8 cups of water and a smoked ham hock. Most home cooks north of the Mason Dixon line don't have a ton of opportunity to use the lesser known bits of the pig, the ham hock being one of them. The "hock" of a ham is part of the hind leg of a pig, usually the section between the joint and the foot. It usually is full of fun stuff like ligaments, bone and a really thick skin. Almost always smoked, cured or smoked and cured, it is used in soups, stews and other braised foods to impart a smoky, salty flavor to the dish. I have used ham hocks in other recipes (Collard Greens, Kale stew, Baked Beans) and they almost always must be cooked for a long period of time to break down the tough tissues inside of hock.
The recipe called for one ham hock, but the ones I had seemed small so I tossed in two. I brought them to a boil and simmered for an hour. Towards the tail end of the hour, I finely chopped an onion and sauteed in butter until soft, then added it into the soup.
The recipe called to cook until the beans were soft (about an hour) and I simmered the beans to the point where they would squish a bit when I squeezed them. I then pulled the hocks out (I don't think I ever thought I would use the word hock so much at one time), and let them cool a bit. I pulled the skin off and set to pull as much meat as possible off the bone. I'm glad that I put two into the stew because the actual meat was pretty scarce. As you can see from the image below, the majority of each piece was bone and skin. During my research several sites said that you could substitute 4 ounces of salt pork or thick cut bacon for a ham hock in a recipe. I think I was able to pull about 4 ounce combined off of the two that I had cooked.
I then took my potato masher and mashed the beans a bit until it had a "thick, creamy texture" as described in the original recipe. I folded in the ham, grabbed a piping hot bowl, ground on some salt and pepper and was ready for lunch.
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| Senate Bean Soup - Schuler Version |
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| Senate Bean Soup - Saveur Version |
The first taste seemed a bit bland, so I doubled up on the salt and pepper. The consistency was good, but the beans didn't seem to be cooked completely. It could be that I personally like beans that are really soft (think Bush's baked) and these were a bit more like al dente pasta. There was a smokey flavor to the soup, but it could have been heavier. I thought about hitting the dutch oven with my stick blender for a minute and trying to puree the beans a bit more, but wanted to stay as true to the recipe as possible. The recipe description noted that it started in the early 20th century, and I could have definitely seen this as being eaten during that time.
I think that there would be a few things that I would have done different if I were to cook this again. First I would soak the beans twice as long and probably cook them twice as long as well. If I used a ham hock again, I would score the skin, letting out more of the flavor, and hopefully breaking the cartilage and connective tissue down a bit more. But I think I would rather cook up a half a pound of thick sliced bacon or browned salt pork, then add 3/4 of it to the beans as they cooked, and the remainder after the beans were mashed.
Notes from my #1 taste tester - "The beans are a bit too tough, but with the flavor of the ham, it reminds me of the baked potato soup from Bennigan's" (where I worked for a few years).
While Elvis Presley's Pound Cake will become at least an annual part of my repertoire, I'm not sure that Senate Bean Soup will be showing up again anytime in the near future.
5 down, 96 to go!
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