Name: French Beans
Ingredients: French beans; butter

Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

French Beans

Ingredients

French beans
butter

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the beans as for steaming.
Cut them up or leave them whole.

Cook and serve

Stew the beans until tender, about 20 minutes.
Serve the beans tossed in butter or coated with a suitable 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.

Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

French beans: Provide the main vegetable, which softens and turns tender during stewing.
Butter: Adds richness and a glossy coating when tossed with the warm beans.

“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.