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Succotash

A dish of lima beans and sweet corn cooked together with butter, cream, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lima beans and corn work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Succotash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put the Lima beans in a pot with enough cold water to cover them.

  2. Add the cobs from the corn and boil for 30 to 45 minutes.

  3. Remove the cobs and add the scraped corn kernels.

  4. Boil for an additional 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Season with salt, pepper, butter, and cream.

  2. 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lima beans + corntop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 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, creamy texture of the dish.
Sweet corn
Adds sweetness and tender kernels that contrast with the beans.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky moisture to the finished dish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, buttery flavor.

Swap the lima beans

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

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Beansfits about as well
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, pepper, cream, egg, butter. 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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