Skip to main content
Main

Bacon and Beans

A dish of boiled bacon with broad beans, topped with breadcrumbs and fried parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Bacon and Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook

  1. Place the bacon in a pan and cover it with cold water.

  2. Boil for over 1 hour.

  3. Add the shelled broad beans and continue boiling until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the skin from the bacon and sprinkle bread crumbs on top.

  2. Serve the bacon with the beans underneath and garnish with fried parsley.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Beans + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together332 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Supplies fat and savory, salty flavor that seasons the cooking liquid and beans.
Broad beans
Provide a starchy, tender body that soaks up the flavor of the cooking liquid.
Bread crumbs
Add a dry, light crumb texture on top of the bacon.

The step that matters

Boiling the beans until tender. Broad beans must cook until soft, but if they boil too long their skins split and they turn mushy. Starch softens gradually as the beans absorb liquid, so checking for tenderness during boiling helps keep them intact.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, bread):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes