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Pickled Beans

Pickled beans are green beans preserved in a salt brine and stored in a muslin sack.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Green beans and sugar work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 115 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Pickled Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. String and cut the beans to fill a 25-pound muslin sugar sack.

  2. Tie the sack and place it in a crock.

Brine and keep

  1. Cover the beans with a salt brine strong enough to float an egg.

  2. Keep the beans like sauerkraut.

Soak and cook

  1. Soak the beans in fresh water for several hours before using.

  2. Cook the beans as you would fresh beans.

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. Green beans + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together115 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Green beans
The vegetable being preserved, which softens and sours while it is kept in the brine.
Salt
Draws water out of the beans and slows spoilage, keeping them preserved in the brine.

The step that matters

Cover the beans with a salt brine strong enough to float an egg.. The brine must be salty enough to hold the beans safely. Enough salt slows spoilage microbes and draws out moisture, while a weak brine can let the beans rot.

“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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