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Lima Beans

A baked dish of lima beans with butter, ham, sugar, salt, flour, herbs, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lima Beans

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the lima beans, butter, diced ham, sugar, salt, flour, and sweet herbs in a paper bag. Add the water to the bag.

Bake

  1. Seal the bag and cook in a moderate oven at 300°F (150°C) for 60 minutes.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

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

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lima beans
Form the bulk of the dish and become tender and creamy as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor through the beans.
Diced ham
Contributes salty, savory flavor that seasons the beans as they cook.
Flour
Lightly thickens the cooking liquid as it gelatinizes in the heat.

The step that matters

Seal the bag. A tightly sealed bag traps steam so the beans cook gently in their own moisture. If the seal leaks, liquid escapes and the beans can dry out or cook unevenly.

Swap the lima beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, ham, sugar, flour. 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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