Why it works: Ham and beans work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine, which smells cocoa, roasted. The science ↓
Bean Soup
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the beans
Pick over and wash the beans, then soak them for 3 to 4 hours.
Drain the beans and place them in a pot with cold water, simmering until soft, about 3 to 4 hours.
Make the stock and finish
Wash the ham bone, place it in a soup kettle, and add the cold water.
Cover and cook just below boiling for 3 hours.
Add the beans to the meat stock 15 minutes before serving.
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.
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Ham + beanstop 22% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together140 recipes
Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Beans
- Provide the main body and starch that thicken the soup as they soften.
- Ham bone
- Releases savory flavor and gelatin into the water during long, gentle cooking.
The step that matters
Cook the stock just below boiling. A gentle simmer extracts flavor from the ham bone without toughening meat or breaking the stock cloudy, while a hard boil can make the broth greasy and cloudy.
“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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