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Kidney Beans

Kidney beans cooked with butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Kidney Beans

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the kidney beans overnight.

  2. In the morning, place the beans in warm water with salt and cook until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain the beans, then stir in the butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Transfer to a deep dish and serve.

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

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

  2. Kidney beans + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together186 recipes

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

  3. Kidney beans + peppertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together718 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

Kidney beans
Provide the main body and starchy, creamy texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Cook the beans until tender. Dried kidney beans must be fully cooked to break down their starches and proteins; undercooked beans can be firm and may contain compounds that cause digestive upset.

Swap the kidney beans

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Kidney 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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