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To Boil French Beans

A simple boiled green bean dish seasoned with salt and finished with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the tops and bottoms of the French beans and remove the strings from each side.

  2. Divide each bean into three or four pieces lengthwise and place them in cold water with a little salt.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil, drain the beans, and add them to the boiling water.

  2. Boil the beans uncovered until done, then drain in a colander.

  3. Serve the beans with a small piece of butter stirred in.

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. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 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

French beans
Provide the main vegetable, which softens and turns tender-crisp when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy coating that carries flavor across the beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans uncovered until done, then drain. Boiling in a large amount of water keeps the beans bright green and cooks them evenly. Overcooking breaks down their cell walls, leaving them dull and soft, so drain them promptly.

“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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