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Salad

String-bean Salad

A salad of steamed string beans, seasoned with salt, served on lettuce with sliced tomato.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

String-bean Salad

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Wash the string beans and steam them until tender.

  2. Remove the strings from the beans and season with salt.

Serve

  1. Serve the beans whole on a lettuce leaf.

  2. Garnish with a sliced raw tomato.

  3. Use any dressing you prefer.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 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

String beans
Form the main body of the salad; steaming softens them to a tender texture.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, tomato. 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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