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Stewed Lima Beans

A creamy stew of lima beans cooked with milk, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Stewed Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the shelled lima beans in cold water for 10 minutes.

  2. Boil the beans in hot, salted water until tender.

Make the stew

  1. Drain the beans and add the hot milk.

  2. Mix the butter with the flour, then add to the beans along with pepper and salt.

  3. Simmer for 3 minutes and pour into a deep dish.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lima beans + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 texture of the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the stew a smoother mouthfeel.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk and beans into a creamy, lightly thickened stew.
Hot milk
Adds creaminess and moisture, forming the stew's liquid base.

The step that matters

Mix the butter with the flour before adding. Blending butter and flour first helps the flour disperse evenly, so it thickens the stew smoothly rather than forming lumps.

Swap the lima beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, 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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