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Beans, Sweet Pickled Wax

A pickled dish of fresh yellow wax beans sweetened with sugar and flavored with cinnamon and optional red pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 511 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Beans, Sweet Pickled Wax

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash the fresh yellow wax beans thoroughly.

  2. Boil the beans in salted water until nearly done, then drain and cool.

Make the pickling liquid

  1. In a saucepan, boil white vinegar with sugar to taste.

  2. Add a stick of cinnamon to the vinegar mixture and let it cool.

Pickle and store

  1. Pour the cooled vinegar mixture over the beans.

  2. If desired, add a piece of small red pepper for extra heat.

  3. Transfer the beans to stone crocks for storage.

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 + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh yellow wax beans
Provide the main vegetable that absorbs the vinegar brine and becomes pickled.
White vinegar
Supplies the acidity that preserves the beans and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.
Stick cinnamon
Adds warm aroma to the pickling liquid.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until nearly done. Beans cooked too long turn soft and mushy, while undercooked beans stay raw and tough. Stopping at nearly done leaves a firm texture that holds up during pickling.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, pepper):

  1. Chickpeafits about as well
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, pepper. 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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