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Salad

String Bean Salad

A salad of cooked string beans, lettuce, and French or mayonnaise dressing, topped with a hard‑boiled egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 500 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

String Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the string beans until tender.

  2. Cut the cooked beans into half-inch pieces.

Serve

  1. Serve the beans on a bed of lettuce.

  2. Drizzle with French dressing or mayonnaise.

  3. Garnish with the yolk of the hard-boiled egg, passed through a potato ricer.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

String beans
Form the main body of the salad and provide its tender, crisp-cooked texture.
French dressing or mayonnaise
Adds moisture, fat and tang that coat the beans and carry the flavour.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Adds richness and a soft, crumbly texture as a garnish.

The step that matters

Cook the string beans until tender. Beans under-cooked stay tough and squeaky, while over-cooked beans turn soft and grey-green. Cooking until just tender keeps them firm enough to cut cleanly and pleasantly crisp.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, egg):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, egg. 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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