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To Boil French Beans

A simple boiled French bean dish seasoned with salt, baking soda, and optional melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the beans and wash them in cold water.

Boil

  1. Put the beans into plenty of boiling water seasoned with salt and baking soda.

  2. Boil quickly without a lid for about 10 to 15 minutes until soft.

Drain and serve

  1. Strain the beans and shake off the excess water.

  2. Serve in a hot dish, plain or with melted butter.

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 + 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

French beans
Form the main body of the dish, cooking down to a soft, tender texture.
Baking soda
Raises the water's alkalinity, helping the beans soften quickly and keep a bright green colour.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat coating when served over the hot beans.

The step that matters

Boil quickly without a lid. A rapid boil in plenty of water keeps the temperature high and the beans cooking evenly. Leaving the lid off lets volatile acids escape, which helps keep the green colour bright.

“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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