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Mazagan Beans

A bean dish with boiled Windsor beans, bacon, bread crumbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Mazagan Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Gather small Windsor beans in the morning when they are fully grown but still young.

  2. Do not shell the beans until you are ready to cook them.

  3. Put the beans into boiling water.

Prepare the bacon

  1. Remove the skin from the boiled bacon and cover it with bread crumbs.

  2. Toast the bacon until golden.

Serve

  1. Place the toasted bacon in the center of a serving dish.

  2. Drain the water from the beans and add a little butter.

  3. Pour the beans around the bacon in the dish.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Beans + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small windsor beans
Form the main body of the dish, providing starch and a mild, tender texture when cooked.
Bacon
Adds savory flavor and fat, and browns to a golden, crisp surface when toasted.
Bread crumbs
Form a coating that toasts to a golden, crunchy crust on the bacon.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat coating that carries flavor over the drained beans.

The step that matters

Toast the bacon until golden. Toasting browns the bread crumbs and bacon through the Maillard reaction, which builds flavor and crispness. Removing it too early leaves the coating pale and soft, while too much heat can scorch the crumbs before the bacon is heated through.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Lima beansfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Peasfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter. 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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