Skip to main content
Main

Lima Beans

Lima beans cooked with butter, salt, pepper, optionally served with white or cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lima beans and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the lima beans for 12 to 24 hours.

  2. Drain the beans.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook them in boiling salted water until soft.

  2. Drain again.

  3. Remove the skins after the first hour of cooking if desired.

  4. Season with butter, salt, and pepper.

  5. Optionally, serve with white or cream sauce.

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. Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Lima beans + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

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

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lima beans + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lima beans
Form the main body of the dish, with a soft, starchy texture once cooked through.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the beans and carrying flavor.

The step that matters

Cook until soft. Dried beans need enough time in simmering water for their starch to gelatinize and their cell walls to soften. Stopping early leaves them firm and mealy, while the skins stay tough.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sauce):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sauce. 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.

More lima beans recipes

Creamed 13Boiled 8Canned 8Dried 6Stewed 6Baked 3 See all 92 →

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes