Name: Bean Porridge
Ingredients: 2 cups dried beans; ½ pound pork, beef, or chicken; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Beans and pork 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 Porridge

Ingredients

2 cups dried beans
½ pound pork, beef, or chicken
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Prepare

Soak the beans overnight and drain them.

Cook and serve

Boil the beans with the meat in 6 cups of water until tender.
Add salt when the porridge is nearly done.
Serve hot or let it age for better flavor.

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.

Beans + porktop 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: Provide the body and starch that thicken the porridge as they cook down.
Pork, beef, or chicken: Adds savory flavor and richness to the cooking liquid.

“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.