Name: French Bean Salad
Ingredients: cold beans; plain dressing; beetroot or tomato slices

Why it works: Beans and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 215 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

French Bean Salad

Ingredients

cold beans
plain dressing
beetroot or tomato slices

Directions

Cut the cold beans into fine strips lengthwise.
Toss with plain dressing.
Garnish with a few slices of beetroot or tomato.

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.

Beans + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together215 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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