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French or String Beans

This dish is boiled string beans seasoned with butter, cayenne, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,733 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

French or String Beans

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. String the beans, starting at the stem end to easily remove the strings.

  2. Cut the beans lengthwise through the centers and gather them into small bunches, securing with twine.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the bunches in a saucepan with boiling salted water and boil for 20 minutes for young beans or 30 minutes for older beans.

  2. Drain the water and transfer the bunches to a vegetable dish, cutting the strings off.

  3. Melt the butter, season with cayenne and pepper, and pour over the beans just before serving.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  2. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

String beans
Form the body of the dish; their cell walls soften as they boil, making them tender to eat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating that carries the seasoning over the beans.

The step that matters

Boiling time. Young and older beans need different boiling times. As beans cook, their cell walls soften, so overcooking makes them mushy and dull in color, while undercooking leaves them fibrous.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Walnutfits about as well
  2. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

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

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