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Baked Beans

A dish of beans cooked with pork and condiments, baked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Beans

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans in cold water overnight.

  2. Boil the beans until they are tender.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer the beans to a baking dish and add your chosen condiments and pork.

  2. Bake in a slow oven at 300°F (150°C) until fully cooked.

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 + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 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

Beans
Provide the main body and starch that become tender and hold the dish together.
Pork
Adds savoury richness and fat that flavours the beans during slow baking.

The step that matters

Bake until fully cooked. Beans must be fully tender before the dish is done; undercooked beans stay firm and starchy. Slow oven heat lets them soften and absorb flavour gradually without drying out.

“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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