Name: Lima Beans
Ingredients: 2 cups fresh lima beans; 2 tablespoons butter; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Lima beans and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lima Beans

Ingredients

2 cups fresh lima beans
2 tablespoons butter
coarse sea salt

Directions

Shell the lima beans and place them in a pan of cold water.
Boil the beans for about 2 hours, or until they are soft.
Drain the beans well and add the butter.
Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

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.

Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together414 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

Lima beans: Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when simmered for a long time.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, coating the beans and giving a rounder, silkier mouthfeel.

“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.