Name: Green or Snap Beans
Ingredients: 3 strips of bacon or salt pork; 1 pound green or snap beans

Why it works: Pork and beans are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Green or Snap Beans

Ingredients

3 strips of bacon or salt pork
1 pound green or snap beans

Directions

Prepare

String the beans, leaving them whole.

Layer

Place the bacon or salt pork in the bottom of a pail.
Add the beans on top of the bacon or salt pork.

Cook

Cook in a cooker for 3 to 4 hours at 450°F to 500°F.

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.

Pork + beanstop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,000 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon or salt pork: Adds fat and smoky, salty flavor that seasons the beans as they cook.
Green or snap beans: Form the body of the dish; long cooking softens their fibers until tender.

“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.