Knickerbocker Soup

"Knickerbocker Soup," from Make It Like a Man!

Spring may be on the way, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Until you can walk the streets in short sleeves, you still need a robust soup now and again to keep your inner furnace going. Our version of Knickerbocker Soup is hearty but not heavy. It has a depth of character that radiates warmth and goodwill, yet retains a lighthearted wit around the edges.

Ingredients for 8 servings:

1 lb. dried Great Northern beans
2 tsp salt, plus more to taste
2 bay leaves
1 lb. bacon, diced
2 Tbs minced garlic (from 3 very large cloves)
1½ cups chopped onion (from 1 medium white onion)
1½ cups diced carrots (from 3 medium carrots)
1/2 tsp Summit County seasoning (see notes)
1/2 tsp thyme
1 cup chicken stock
1½ cups diced, skins-on potato (from 1 large potato)
1 large can (28 oz.) diced tomatoes
1/4 cup cocktail sauce (optional, see notes)
Freshly ground pepper
Minced parsley for garnish (optional)

How to do it:

  1. Pick over the beans and rinse them thoroughly. Place them in a large soup pot and cover them with 8 cups of hot tap water. Add salt. Cover the pot and bring the beans to a boil over very high heat, about 7 minutes. Reduce heat to a lively simmer for 2 minutes, then turn off the heat. Let them soak (covered) for 1 hour. (See bean notes.)
  2. Add bay to the pot, and bring the beans back to a boil, covered, over medium heat (about 10 minutes). Set heat to lowest setting. Simmer until beans are tender, about 1¾ hours. Meanwhile, proceed with next steps.
  3. Fry the bacon over medium heat until crisp, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Unless your pan is greater than 10 inches in diameter, I recommend doing this in two batches.
  4. Remove bacon from the pan with a slotted spoon and set half of it aside. Reserve the other half for garnishing; try not to nosh on it.
  5. Pour off all but 3 Tbs of the rendered fat. Add the garlic, and stir over medium heat until fragrant, about 1 minute.
  6. Add the onion, carrots, Summit County seasoning, and thyme. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the carrots are just tender, about 10 minutes.
  7. Add salt, to taste. Remove veggies with a slotted spoon and add to the set-aside bacon.
  8. Add stock and potatoes to the sauté pan. Salt to taste. Cover and cook until the potatoes are soft, about 10 minutes. Off heat. Correct salt.
  9. Remove the bay from the finished beans. Add the potatoes and their cooking liquid, the set-aside veggies and bacon, the tomatoes, (and the cocktail sauce). Season with (loads of) pepper. Add more salt if necessary. Reheat and serve hot, garnished with bacon crumbles (and parsley).
"Knickerbocker Soup," from Make It Like a Man! closeup

Notes:

Cooking Tips

Like most soups, this one is as good if not better left over. Believe it or not, four days later it’s actually astounding – so much so that the directions ought to instruct you to wait four days before reheating it! Seriously, I’d serve this after four days to guests, with pride. Add two teaspoons of water or stock (optionally) to each serving before reheating.

The easiest way to dice bacon is with high-quality kitchen shears.

Realize that the texture of the carrots at the end of Step 6 is what it’s going to be in the finished soup. They’ll be tender, but they’ll still have a bite. I like what this brings to the texture of the soup as a whole. If you’d like them softer, add them before you add the onions, let them go for three-to-five minutes, then add the onions and go for ten more.

Summit County seasoning is aromatic and bittersweet with a whiff of citrus. Substitute fennel, arrowroot, lemon peel, marjoram, basil, rosemary, and/or oregano.

I say this too often perhaps, but I’m not usually a garnish guy unless the garnish adds more than just looks. The bacon garnish on this soup tastes fanfuckingtastic.

If you find this soup not witty enough for these dark times when vampire-like lawyers go on TV and tell you that truth is no longer true, add 1/4-cup of cocktail sauce – exactly the stuff you would dunk shrimp in. They probably sell it near where they keep the fresh shrimp in your favorite grocery store. It will coax the soup into having a conversation about borscht, which – trust me – is hysterical.

Beans

Ever wonder why you’re always told to pick over dried beans? Well, even though they may look uniform in the package, it’s possible for foreign materials to get harvested with the beans and somehow make it into your package. I found this:

A garbanzo bean?

Rinsing the beans is important. Dried beans can’t be washed before packaging. So, remnants of whatever was with them in the field where they grew (let your imagination run wild) could remain.

Most recipes call for discarding the soaking water before cooking, but the Navy recipe specifically says not to do this. There are interesting arguments on both sides. The side I lean toward is represented by Black Beans – Toss the soak water? from Stack Exchange. Even though the question is about black beans, the answer discusses beans in general (and cites my food-science hero, Harold McGee). Interesting note: many people feel that soaking simply isn’t necessary at all, making “tossing the water” a moot point.

Backstory

Knickerbocker Soup was the province of the post-WWII Armed Services and the civilian wives who attempted to recreate it for their veteran husbands. Now that so few of that generation are still with us, this soup has fallen into obscurity. A Google search brings up a miniscule 600k hits.

This recipe is based on one from The Cookbook of the United States Navy, NAVSANDA Publication 7, 1945. The Navy recipe produces a soup that is almost exclusively “bean.” The other ingredients are there only in small quantities, as added flavor. While this is economical and is probably influenced by the practicality of storing food long-term at sea, I felt compelled to rebalance the ingredients into more of a mutual medley. I also modified the method to get more flavor out of the veggies.

Exploring the Navy cookbook is a long-term project that you can read about here.

"Knickerbocker Soup," from Make It Like a Man!

Knickerbocker Soup

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! Thank you, Kesor. This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. 

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36 thoughts on “Knickerbocker Soup

    • I thought the same thing. I wasn’t planning on using the whole pound. (And I have to confess that I ate maybe four strips while I was cooking.) But once I had all the bacon cooked up, and saw what a big pot of soup I was making, I clearly needed all of it. 😉

    • Yes, I’ve never been to Summit County, but I guess I know what it tastes like!

  1. I’m picturing you having a conversation with your soup about borscht…and you’re right, it is indeed hilarious. I wasn’t familiar with Knickerbocker Soup until now, but it sounds quite tasty. Perfect for these chilly days that are lingering around. Also, I like to think that the rogue bean there was just trying to escape its fate and see what it would be like to live as a Great Northern bean instead.
    David @ Spiced recently posted…Sweet and Sour Shrimp

  2. Sounds like a really nice soup. Hearty but, as you say, not too heavy. Curious about the name. I associate “Knickerbocker” with New York but you say the recipe comes from a Navy cookbook. Must be some back story there? Also intrigued by the Summit County spice. I’d never heard of it but it sounds really nice.
    Frank recently posted…Pasta con la mollica (Pasta with Breadcrumbs)

    • I’d never heard of this soup until I saw it in mentioned in a Navy museum exhibit. “Knickerbockers” is the long form of the more familiar “knickers.” I say “more familiar,” but I’m one of the cultural elite, you know – with a large vocabulary and whatnot. People whose sense of culture was gleaned primarily via Instagram might know them as the old-style baseball pants that are cut off right below the knee. Sailors used to wear them, and I believe that, although this soup was served in other areas of the Armed Forces, it was primarily a Navy tradition.

  3. Mmm, bacon. 🙂 More and more these days I’m not soaking beans before cooking. You just basically double the cooking time. Go back and forth on this all the time, though. Anyway, lovely soup — bean soups are incredibly good. Thanks!
    John / Kitchen Riffs recently posted…Fennel and Pear Salad

    • Yeah … when I haven’t soaked, I’ve oven burst the beans. With a quick soak, I have better luck. But I’ll bet if I were more careful with the temperature, I could just do away with the soak altogether.

  4. Sometimes I soak beans sometimes I don’t. I don’t have a hard fast rule and am tending toward the idea that it doesn’t really matter. GREG

  5. This soup recipe looks amazing! Huge fan of making bean soups especially with dried beans of almost any kind. Yes, most recipes would say to discard the water after soaking but i don’t do it. Soaking beans is practiced in our culture for two reasons- to cook them faster and second to increase their digestibility.

    • Hi Balvinder! Thank you for stopping by, and I’m glad you liked the soup recipe!

  6. Your navy cookbook project sounds so interesting. Very cool.
    This soup sound amazing. White beans are my favorite and I cook with them all the time. And I am always a fan of generous amounts of garlic and bacon. I’d love a bowl of this any time of year.

  7. I’ve heard of a Knickerbocker Glory, but not the soup. Sounds and looks very yummy and I’m all in for the cocktail sauce. We did, however, have Navy beans often when I was growing up. My dad always poured syrup on top of his. He said when he was in the army that poring on syrup was the only way he could eat them.
    Ron recently posted…Tunnbrödsrulle, a classic Swedish street food…

    • Syrup and beans sounds oddly interesting, but I doubt I’ll try it anytime soon!

    • Where I live, summer is June, July, and August – and sometimes not all of June. You’ll have to look backwards in my posts to those months to see summer dishes. I do this mainly as a hobby, and a once-a-week post is about as much as I can manage and still have fun doing it.

    • How awful! We had snow, too – but I’m so glad it didn’t stick. Glad you like the soup, though!

  8. Yummyy😍 it looks delicious .
    Im new you can check out my recipes on my site.

  9. I dont think its a seasonal one because eating soup insummer while you are in a air condition room is great! I never had that knicker kind of soup. Definitely going to try this delicious recipe ! Moreover jeff i have started a website of recipes too its not good like yours but i request if you can check it out as my mentor 🙂
    Mishkeezay recently posted…CHICKEN FAJITA QUESADILLAS

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