Name: Bean Soup
Ingredients: 1 piece of pickled pork; 2 quarts water; 1 quart dried beans; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Pork and beans are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

1 piece of pickled pork
2 quarts water
1 quart dried beans
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Prepare

In a pot, combine the pickled pork and 2 quarts of water.
In another pot, add 1 quart of picked and washed dried beans and bring to a boil.

Cook

Once boiling, drain the beans in a colander and add them to the pot with the pork.
Cover with water and boil until the beans are soft.

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.

Pork + beanstop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,000 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

Dried beans: Soften during long boiling and release starch that gives the soup body.
Pickled pork: Adds savory, salty flavor and some fat to the broth.

“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.