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Stewed Beans

A simple stew of haricot beans, onion, and herbs, simmered until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 113 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Stewed Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the haricot beans overnight.

  2. Place the soaked beans in a saucepan with the chopped onion.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook for 2 to 3 hours until tender.

  2. Half an hour before serving, add seasoning and a pinch of sage, marjoram, or parsley.

  3. Serve thick and creamy, not sloppy.

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 + sagetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together113 recipes

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

  2. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  3. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Provide the main body of the dish, softening into a thick, creamy texture when cooked.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens into the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking until tender. Dried haricot beans need a long, gentle simmer to soften fully; stopping early leaves them firm and grainy. Adding seasoning late, as the recipe directs, helps keep the skins from toughening during cooking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sage):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sage. 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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