Name: French Beans, with Fine Herbs
Ingredients: 1 pound French beans; 2 tablespoons fresh butter; 1 tablespoon chopped and parboiled parsley; 2 shallots, finely chopped; a pinch of nutmeg; a pinch of mignonette pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; juice of 1 lemon; croutons for serving

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

French Beans, with Fine Herbs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

Boil the French beans until tender.

Make the herb butter

In a stewpan, melt the butter over medium heat.
Add the parsley, shallots, nutmeg, mignonette pepper, salt, and lemon juice.
Simmer until melted.

Combine and serve

Add the boiled beans to the stewpan.
Toss to combine.
Serve the beans with croutons arranged around them.

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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,062 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 body of the dish, cooked until tender.
Butter: Adds richness and carries the flavour of the herbs and seasonings across the beans.
Shallots: Add a mild, sweet onion-like savour that softens as it cooks in the butter.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the buttery coating and balances its richness.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, parsley, shallot, nutmeg, pepper, lemon):

Chickpeafits better
Pistachiofits better
Chestnutfits better
Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, shallot, nutmeg, pepper, lemon. 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.