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White Beans, À LA Lyonnaise

White beans cooked with sauce tournee, green onions, parsley, sugar, egg yolks, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

White Beans, À LA Lyonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Boil the white beans and peel off the skin.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the beans with sauce tournee, green onions, parsley, and sugar.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the herbs.

  4. Thicken the sauce with beaten egg yolks and cream.

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

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

  2. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

White beans
Form the body of the dish, absorbing the sauce as they cook.
Sauce tournee (no. 6)
Provides the base sauce that carries the beans and flavour.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they set gently with heat.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with beaten egg yolks and cream. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently, but if the sauce boils after they are added they can scramble and turn grainy. Keep the heat low and stir steadily.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sauce, onion, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sauce, onion, sugar, egg, cream. 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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