Main Ingredients:

See below ingredients and instructions of the recipe

Cooking Preparation of the Recipe:

1 lb Navy beans, dried
1 Ham bone (get one
-with plenty of
-meat on it)
12 c Water
3 md Onions, chopped fine
3 Garlic cloves, minced
3 Celery stalks,
-chopped fine
1/4 c Parsley (fresh),
-chopped fine
1 c Potatoes, mashed
1 ts Salt (or less
-to taste)
1/4 ts Pepper
1/4 c Chives (fresh),
-chopped

Wash the beans and remove those that float in the wash water. Soak
beans overnight in enough water to cover them by several inches.
Drain.

In a large kettle, place 3 quarts of cold water. Add the drained
beans and the ham bone and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer,
partially covered, for 2 hours. If scum forms on the surface, skim it
off.

Chop the onions, garlic, celery and parsley. Add to the pot. Add the
mashed potato to the pot. Simmer 1 more hour. Check the beans. If
they are not yet tender, then simmer some more.

Add salt and pepper. Remove the ham bone and pull the meat from it.
Cut the meat into small chunks and toss them back into the soup.
Serve piping hot into preheated bowls and sprinkle chopped fresh
chives atop each.

NOTES:

* Bean soup as served in the U.S. Senate dining room -- I lived in
suburban Washington, DC, for most of my formative years. One of the
things that formed in the aforementioned years was a strong
impression that the government was full of beans. One day on a school
visit to my senator I learned just how it was that the government got
to be so full of beans, and I came away with the recipe. This is one
of the best soups I have ever tasted. Serve it with a big loaf of
fresh hot homemade whole-wheat bread, from which people just tear the
bread with their fingers.

* The House of Representatives serves a version without the onions
and garlic and mashed potatoes.

* Great Northern beans are an adequate substitute for Navy beans.
If you forgot to soak them overnight and still want to make the soup,
you can simmer them for an hour and then discard that water. The
beans end up with slightly more flavor if you cold-soak them.

* You can almost certainly get away with using instant mashed potato
flakes to acquire the 1 cup of mashed potatoes that this recipe calls
for.

: Difficulty: easy.
: Time: 8 hours soaking, 10 minutes preparation, 3 hours cooking.
: Precision: no need to measure.

: Brian Reid
: DEC Western Research, Palo Alto, California
: reid#decwrl.dec.com {ihnp4,decvax}!decwrl!reid

: Copyright (C) 1986 USENET Community Trust

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