Cranberry Bean and Tomato Soup

Right about now is the time of year soup gets back on my radar. Freakish 80 degree weather at the end of October aside, Boston is creeping into fall. Cool nights are making me encourage all of the cats to sleep on my feet and keep them warm, there are pumpkins and dried corn stalks everywhere, the leaves are crinkly and orange gold, the sky is darkening before I leave work, and Halloween is right around the corner. In other words, prime soup time.



Fall soups feel different and more vibrant to me than winter soups because they can still make use of lots of the fresh ingredients that are just petering out at the end of harvest rather than relying on things you've frozen or scrounged from the grocery store or the squash that you've been keeping in your basement for months (maybe that's just me--I got through the last of the squash we picked in November sometime in March). As some of you know, I've been particularly obsessed with the amazing heirloom tomato crop this year and every weekend I've been going down to the Farmer's Market hoping that there will be "just one more" week of tomatoes. I haven't been disappointed yet, but my hopes for this Saturday are pretty tentative.



So far though, the weather has been cooperating vis-à-vis my desire to eat fresh local tomatoes and I've been able to enjoy them in this fantastic soup which also features an sort of unusual local ingredient, the cranberry bean, more generically called the shell bean, or at least, that's what everyone seems to call them here in New England.

These beans are also a favorite in northern Italy where they are called borlotti beans. Though they also grow in Italy, the majority of borlotti beans for sale in Italy are actually cranberry beans from the United States. Gourmet Sleuth says that the beans are also known as borlotto, crab eye, roman, romano, rosecoco, and saluggia beans. Though pinto beans seem to be be recommended most often as a substitute, if you can find them, tongues of fire beans (which should win an award for best name of bean ever) are probably closer. Neither cranberry or tongue of fire beans are especially common varieties, but tongue of fire beans are popular in Spanish and Portuguese cooking and cranberry/borlotti in Italian, so you'll probably have more luck at stores which specialize in those cuisines and sell dried beans. Otherwise, I would suggest that white beans or great northerns make good substitutes as well and those are readily available in canned forms.



On the outside cranberry beans look like Barbie took a can of spray paint to them, but inside the actual beans are mostly white with tiny pink markings which disappear while they cook. They're fairly large as beans go, similar to pinto beans or great northerns and much bigger than a black bean. They have a pleasantly creamy texture and a lightly nutty flavor, which I've seen likened to a chestnut, though that wouldn't be my first point of comparison.

Lots of people swear by dried beans over canned, but if you've never had freshly shelled beans, you are in for a bit of a revelation. They cook quickly and get creamy inside while the skin holds up nicely on the out, giving it a bit of toothsome bite and texture. Well prepared dried beans come close, but this is an instance where really and truly most anyone can taste the difference of fresh. I found a source on the internet for dried cranberry beans though and I'm interested in seeing how they compare to using fresh.



All of the ingredients for this soup actually come together to throw a party for freshness. The tomatoes, the beans, the herbs, they all taste bright and vibrant, as well as comforting. I've made it three times and have grown to love it more with each iteration, though I knew at the first bowl that it was going to be one of my favorite soups. I began with the recipe for Cranberry Bean Soup in Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love, a tome of a cookbook that I highly recommend to anyone who loves vegetables, wants to learn about the social, geographical and culinary history of them, and has an eye for veganizing since it is explicitly not a veggie cookbook. She brilliantly begins the soup base by cooking down fresh tomatoes and it is the liquid from those tomatoes that makes up much of the broth for this soup. I can't say I'm a huge fan of tomato soup generally speaking, it seems a little cloying and flat to me, but this is something totally different, just the tiniest bit sweet, tangy, and rich with fruity olive oil and browned garlic.



There's lots of room for color variation if you're playing with heirloom tomatoes, more yellow gives you a golden broth, more red a fiery colored base. Tweaking the herbs will give you really different results too since every ingredient comes through beautifully in this soup. I liked the lemon thyme a lot and might consider adding just a little bit of lemon if lemon thyme weren't available. The final batch I made I used two cans of white beans. In that batch fresh tomatoes were the stars and I missed the substance, texture and bite of the beans, but it's still a stellar soup and one I know I'll be making through the darker, colder days ahead. You can make it too, I'll post the recipe below.



Also for the cooler days, I revisited a crème de cassis cupcake that I made last winter during the coldest day of the year in Boston. Crème de cassis is a blackcurrant liqueur that I was first introduced to as a great thing to add to a little champagne for celebrations. It is made from crushed blackcurrants that ferment into alcohol. I prefer less sweet recipes and have tended to really like the varieties that say specifically "Crème de Cassis de Dijon." The deep wine flavors and blackberry-currant bite on these were a great follow-up dessert to the soup and the cake is a beautiful soft purple-brown, which is not unlike the paint color of my living room and dining room walls. The name of that paint color is swiss-mocha, which has never made any sense to me and henceforth I will think of it as crème de cassis cupcake.


Cranberry Bean Tomato Soup
adapted from Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love

3 Tablespoons olive oil
1/2 cup chopped shallot
4 cloves minced garlic
2 ½ pounds chopped tomato
1 pound shelled cranberry beans (or other fresh shelled bean, dry beans soaked overnight and drained, or 2 cans rinsed and drained beans)
1 ¾ cup water
20 leaves fresh basil, divided, chopped
5 leaves fresh sage, chopped
1 teaspoon fresh thyme or lemon thyme
1 teaspoon sea salt
black pepper to taste

In a medium sauce pan, heat the olive oil and add shallots and garlic, stir over medium heat until shallots are clear and garlic is lightly browned.

Add chopped tomato and stir occasionally for about 20 minutes or until they have released liquid and are very soft.

Stir in beans and water and allow it to cook for another 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add half of the basil along with the sage, thyme, salt and pepper, stir well and let simmer for about two minutes.

To serve, top with remaining basil leaves.