Name: String-bean Salad
Ingredients: 12 fresh string beans; coarse sea salt (to taste); 1 lettuce leaf; 1 raw tomato (sliced); dressing of your choice

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

Prepare

Wash the string beans and steam them until tender.
Remove the strings from the beans and season with salt.

Serve

Serve the beans whole on a lettuce leaf.
Garnish with sliced raw tomato and add your preferred dressing.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,713 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together500 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
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 and provide its tender, slightly firm texture once steamed.
Raw tomato: Adds fresh acidity and juiciness that contrasts with the mild, tender beans.