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Boiled Broad or Windsor Beans

A simple boiled bean dish seasoned with salt, served with butter and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Boiled Broad or Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring 1 gallon of water to a boil and add 1 heaped tablespoon of coarse sea salt.

  2. Add the shelled beans to the boiling water and cook until tender, about 15 to 25 minutes.

  3. Drain the beans in a colander.

  4. Serve the beans with a separate tureen of melted butter and chopped parsley.

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 + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. 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

Broad beans
Form the main body of the dish, cooked until tender and soft in the centre.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel when melted over the beans.
Parsley
Adds a fresh, herbal aroma that brightens the mild flavour of the beans.

The step that matters

Cook until tender, then drain promptly. Beans cooked past tender turn mushy and lose their bright colour, while under-cooked beans stay starchy and firm. Draining promptly stops residual heat from overcooking them.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter. 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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