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French Way of Dressing Lima Beans

A side dish of boiled lima beans seasoned with butter, pepper, salt, and finished with beaten egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lima beans and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

French Way of Dressing Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the lima beans until tender.

  2. Pour off the water, leaving some moisture.

Season and stew

  1. Add butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt to season.

  2. Place the beans over coals and stew them.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, beat the egg yolk lightly and stir it into the beans.

  2. Do not return the beans to the heat after adding the egg.

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. Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lima beans + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

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

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lima beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together78 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

Lima beans
Form the starchy body of the dish, softened by boiling and stewing.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the beans.
Egg yolk
Enriches the beans with fat and emulsifiers, thickening them lightly as it warms.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolk. Heat gently thickens the yolk, but too much heat scrambles it and makes the beans grainy instead of silky. Stirring it in just before serving, with the beans off the heat, lets the residual warmth thicken it smoothly.

Swap the lima beans

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Peasfits about as well
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, 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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