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Haricots a Rames

Creamed lima beans cooked with butter, flour, cream, herbs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 9,057 recipes mention both. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the lima beans overnight.

  2. Drain the beans.

  3. Place the beans in a saucepan with 3 pints of boiling water.

Cook

  1. Boil the beans until very tender, about 2 hours.

  2. After 1 hour, add salt to taste.

  3. Drain the beans.

  4. Return the beans to the saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the cream, flour blended with butter, thyme, parsley, and bay leaf.

  2. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Serve hot.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,118 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + creamtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together41,494 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Lima beans + buttertop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Lima beans
Provide the main body and starchy, tender texture of the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth, lightly bound sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps blend the flour smoothly into the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the flour and butter mixture to the cream. Flour must be blended with butter first so it disperses without lumps. Simmering gently after adding it lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce evenly.

Flavor stand-ins for the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, cream, pepper, thyme, parsley):

  1. Walnutbetter flavor fit
  2. Almondbetter flavor fit
  3. Chickpeabetter flavor fit
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, cream, pepper, thyme, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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