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Haricot Beans, Stewed

A stew of boiled haricot beans with diced bacon, onion, and fat, simmered in boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Haricot Beans, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bacon into small dice and let it stand for five minutes.

  2. Pour the fat into a stewpan and heat it.

  3. Drain the bacon and brown it in the fat.

  4. Boil the minced onion in boiling water for four minutes.

Stew

  1. Add the browned bacon and onion to the stewpan.

  2. Cook slowly for ten minutes.

  3. Add the boiled haricot beans and cook for an additional ten minutes.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 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

Haricot beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the flavour of the bacon and onion.
Brown bacon
Adds savoury, smoky flavour and fat as it browns in the pan.
Fat
Carries heat into the bacon so it browns, and adds richness to the stew.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens in the stew.

The step that matters

Browning the bacon. Browning the drained bacon in hot fat builds savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. If the bacon is crowded or wet, it steams instead and the stew tastes flat.

“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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