A Navy Bean Soup for America

And Some Important Questions for Us

Full recipe is below.

The U.S. Senate has one unbroken tradition. Of course, it’s not bipartisanship, fiscal responsibility, or reading the bills before voting on them.

It’s soup.

Senate Bean Soup.

Sometime in the early 1900s, someone decided that navy bean soup would appear on the Senate dining room menu every single day, without exception. Through recesses, through wars, through government shutdowns that left federal workers without paychecks, through every variety of dysfunction that building has managed to produce, the soup got made. With one exception: a single day during World War II when food rationing made it unavailable. That’s it. One day in over a century.

The origin story is, appropriately, disputed. One account credits Idaho Senator Fred Dubois, who reportedly pushed for the soup to be a permanent fixture. Another points to Minnesota Senator Knute Nelson, who expressed his fondness for it around 1903. A third version says it was House Speaker Joe Cannon who showed up to the dining room, found the soup missing from the menu, and had strong feelings about that. The details shift depending on the source. What doesn’t shift is the soup.

The recipe itself is almost aggressively simple. Navy beans. A smoked ham hock. An onion. Butter. That’s the whole list. No stock or aromatics (unless you want them, as I do), no technique that requires a culinary degree. Just humble ingredients given enough time to become something worth returning to every single day.

It seems an institution with a well-earned reputation for gridlock can at leastt commit to something simple and follow through on it every day for over a century. The question the Partnership for Public Service is now asking Americans is what else we decide deserves that kind of commitment.

Their campaign, running through May 18, invites the public to weigh in on exactly that. Not what government is. What you want it to be. Three prompts, open to anyone, and the results will inform real policy conversations tied to America’s 250th anniversary this July.

Government would work better if…

A government that meets my needs is…

It’s 2050 and the government finally…

Visit 250.ourpublicservice.org/yourgov and add your voice before May 18.

Then make the soup.

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U.S. Senate Bean Soup

Serves 4 to 6

Ingredients

• 14 oz dried navy beans (great northern beans work as a substitute)

• ¾ lb smoked ham hock (or ham bone with some meat on it)

• 1 ¾ quarts cold water (or chicken or veggie stock)

• ½ tsp baking soda (optional, but recommended)

• 1 large yellow onion, diced

• 1 tablespoon butter (or vegetable oil)

• Kosher salt and fresh black pepper, to taste

• Optionally, I add chopped celery (1 stalk), carrots (2 med), and garlic (2 cloves).

• Chives or parsley for garnish, also optional

Directions

1. Rinse the dried beans under cold water and remove any debris. Place them in a large Dutch oven or heavy pot along with the ham hock and 2 quarts of cold water. If using baking soda, add it now — it helps soften the beans from the inside out and means you can skip an overnight soak.

2. Bring the pot just to a boil, then reduce to a gentle simmer. Cover with the lid slightly ajar and cook for about 3 hours, stirring occasionally, until the beans are completely soft and the soup is thick and creamy. If the liquid gets low before the beans are done, add more water and keep going.

   Note: You can also make this in a pressure cooker in about 45 minutes.

3. While the soup finishes, melt the butter/oil in a skillet over medium heat. Add the diced onion and cook, stirring frequently, until soft and translucent but not browned, about 5 to 8 minutes. (If adding the other veggies/aromatics, add the celery and carrots at the same time as the onion, then the garlic about 4 minutes in.) Stir the onions/mixture into the pot.

4. Remove the ham hock and let it cool slightly. Pull the meat from the bone (if any) into bite-sized pieces and return it to the soup. Discard the bone.

5. Bring the soup back to a gentle boil, then taste and season with salt and pepper. The ham hock carries a lot of salt on its own, so season gradually.

6. Garnish with chives or parsley if desired and serve hot. It’s great with crackers or crusty bread. Enjoy!

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A note on the history: the Senate’s own website acknowledges that the origin story is more legend than documented fact, which I think actually makes it better. The institution kept making the soup long after anyone could agree on why they started. That’s either a lesson in commitment or a lesson in bureaucratic inertia, and I’ll let you decide which.

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