Skip to main content
Side

String or Green Snap Beans

A sautéed green snap bean dish with onion, parsley, butter, flour, and stock, optionally with diced potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

String or Green Snap Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Cut off the tops and bottoms of the beans and remove the strings.

  2. Break the beans into 1-inch pieces and soak in cold water with a little salt for 10-15 minutes.

Cook

  1. In a stew pan, heat the drippings or butter and sauté the onion and parsley for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the beans and add them to the stew pan, cooking until tender, adding soup stock as needed.

  3. Sift in the flour and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Add meat gravy or more soup stock to enhance flavor.

  5. Add diced potatoes.

  6. Cook until tender.

Serve

  1. 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  4. Beans + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green snap beans
Form the main body of the dish and become tender through long cooking.
Flour
Sifted in to thicken the cooking liquid into a light gravy.
Drippings or butter
Carry the onion and parsley flavor and add richness to the pan.
Soup stock or cream
Supplies moisture and body to the beans as they simmer.
Onion
Sautéed to build a savory, aromatic base for the dish.

The step that matters

Sift in the flour. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump; sifting it in while stirring spreads it evenly so it thickens smoothly rather than forming lumps.

Swap the potato

The recipe marks potato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, parsley, butter, flour, pepper, cream):

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Okrafits about as well
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, onion, parsley, butter, flour, pepper, cream. 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.

You might also like

Onion PuddingOnion Pudding9 recipesEggplant CakesEggplant Cakes34 recipesEscalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)Escalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)25 recipesParsnip CroquettesParsnip Croquettes12 recipes