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Spanish Beans

A bean stew with tomatoes, garlic, onions, bay leaves, chili pepper, salt, cayenne pepper, and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spanish Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Boil the beans in soda water for 20 minutes, then wash off.

Cook

  1. Add tomatoes, garlic, onions, bay leaves, chili pepper, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Boil for three hours.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer to a baking dish and place slices of bacon on top.

  2. Bake for 30 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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Beans + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,935 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Frijoles (beans)
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the flavours of the sauce as they cook.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity and liquid that break down during the long simmer into a thick sauce.
Bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savoury flavour, and browns on top in the oven.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth as they soften during cooking.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows and sweetens as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the beans in soda water, then wash off. Soaking and boiling beans in an alkaline solution softens the skins and shortens cooking time. Rinsing afterwards removes the soda, so the beans taste clean rather than bitter or soapy.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, tomato, garlic, pepper):

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, tomato, garlic, 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.

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