Blue Cayenne

Shirley Temple, remember her?

In 1935 she made the song Animal Crackers In My Soup insanely popular, performing the song in her movie Curly Top.

Here are the lyrics if you want to sing along: Curly Top/Animal Crackers in my Soup.

Curly Top takes you on a welcome journey back into simpler times.

No wait! 1935.

We were in the middle of the Great Depression. Forget that reference to simpler times. Curly Top must have provided a little escape from the collapse of the economy. Shirley played an orphan who charms a rich benefactor. Hope and resilience!

Unlike Shirley’s soup, there are no lions and tigers in today’s great soup recipe, but there is a lot of an equally unexpected ingredient: pears.

That’s right. There are pears in this soup.

Who knew you could even do that?

The original recipe comes from a cookbook More Mandy’s. (Mandy’s is a gourmet salad restaurant in Montreal, Canada. (Yay, Canada, by the way.) The book is available from your local independent bookstore or online.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen. 

For anyone out there who loves a good Alfredo sauce (you know who you are), this use of the classic sauce with beans is a revelation.  

That’s right.

Beans.

Who woulda thought?

I made my dish with the giant Royal Corona beans made famous by the Rancho Gordo Bean Company in Napa, but the original recipe simply used white beans from a can. It’s your call, but the Rancho Gordo beans are pretty wonderful in this dish. 

Here is a link to the Rancho Gordo site: Rancho Gordo Beans.

I’ve used Rancho Gordo beans on any number of recipes here on Blue Cayenne. They’re the freshest and most interesting dried beans around.  Founded by former web-designer and  jazz DJ  Steve Sando in 2001, The Rancho Gordo bean company has a huge and devoted following ranging from high-end restaurant chefs like Thomas Keller to home cooks like yours truly. The company’s laudable mission is to preserve traditional and rare bean varieties and to support sustainable farming techniques and small-scale farmers. While the company specializes in heirloom beans grown in Mexico, these particular Royal Corona beans are grown for them in Poland. Rancho Gordo advertises the Royal Coronas as beans  “created in Mesoamerica, bred in Italy and grown in Poland.”  That’s quite a biography for this pretty (and way large) bean. 

This recipe is from The New York Times. The original recipe appears here.

Here is the recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen.

Every month Blue Cayenne features recipes from our archive of more than four hundred recipes. These recipes are our “Oldies But Goodies.” Today’s Oldie But Goodie recipe is for Mediterranean Greens and Phyllo Pie . You will find the recipe here.  .

Want to dive deeper into our recipe archive? Just click one of the categories at the top of this page or use the category search drop down menu on the right side of this page.

And…here is a link to Blue Cayenne’s main page: Blue Cayenne.If you are in the mood to cook (or eat!), we hope you will take a moment to look at the many excellent recipes we have featured.