Skip to main content
Main

Cream of Lima Beans

A creamy soup made from soaked lima beans, onions, carrots, butter, flour, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,555 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cream of Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the dried lima beans overnight.

  2. Drain the beans.

  3. Add the beans to 3 pints of cold water.

  4. Cook the beans until tender.

  5. Rub the cooked beans through a sieve.

Make the soup

  1. In a pan, cook the onion and carrot cubes in 2 tablespoons of butter until yellow.

  2. Add the cream or milk, 2 tablespoons of butter, 2 tablespoons of flour, salt, and pepper to the pan.

  3. Stir the mixture into the boiling soup.

  4. Strain the soup.

  5. Serve the soup.

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. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Lima beans + carrottop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together131 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried lima beans
Form the body of the soup once cooked and rubbed through a sieve.
Butter
Carries the onion and carrot flavor and enriches the texture of the finished soup.
Flour
Thickens the cream mixture so the soup becomes smooth and velvety.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and a creamy, mellow body to the soup.

The step that matters

Stirring the cream mixture into the boiling soup. Flour-thickened dairy can clump or curdle if it meets very hot liquid abruptly. Adding it to the pan first and then stirring it into the soup helps keep the texture smooth.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, carrot, cream, flour, pepper):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, carrot, cream, flour, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes