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Dessert

Shelled Beans

A simple dish of boiled and mashed beans seasoned with butter and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cranberry and beans share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Shelled Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the beans in boiling water until tender.

  2. Drain and mash the beans finely with a broad fork.

Season and serve

  1. Add butter and coarse sea salt to taste.

  2. Heat in a hot pan for 1-2 minutes before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cranberry + beanstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Cranberry + buttertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together291 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cranberry beans
Provide the main body, starch and bulk of the dish once cooked and mashed.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the mashed beans a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Mashing the beans finely. Beans that are not mashed fine enough stay grainy. Cooking them fully tender first lets the starch break down easily, so the mash becomes smooth rather than lumpy.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cranberry, butter):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Pecansfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cranberry, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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