Name: Bean Soup
Ingredients: one pint beans; four quarts water; one table- spoon flour

Why it works: Beans and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,080 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

one pint beans
four quarts water
one table- spoon flour

Directions

Combine one pint beans, four quarts water, and a small piece of fat beef.
Boil for three hours and strain.
If too thin, add one tablespoon flour.

By Home for the Friendless (Chicago, Ill.). 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. See the original page.

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 + flourtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,080 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans: Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they break down during boiling.
Flour: Thickens the soup if it is too thin, adding body through starch.

“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.