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Bean Salad

A salad of boiled yellow wax beans dressed with olive oil, mustard, cider vinegar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. String the yellow wax beans and boil them whole until tender.

  2. Remove the beans and place them on a clean cloth to cool.

  3. Once cooled, transfer the beans to a salad dish.

Dress and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix olive oil, salt, pepper, and mustard.

  2. Add cider vinegar to the mixture and stir well.

  3. Pour the dressing over the beans and toss gently.

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 + mustardtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  2. Beans + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Olive + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Yellow wax beans
Provide the main body and texture of the salad.
Olive oil
Carries flavor and gives the dressing a smooth, rich body.
Prepared mustard
Emulsifies the dressing so the oil and vinegar hold together better.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the oil.

The step that matters

Cool the beans before dressing. Warm beans absorb dressing unevenly and can turn soft or watery. Cooling them on a clean cloth lets surface moisture evaporate so the oil-and-vinegar dressing clings and seasons the beans well.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, pepper, mustard, cider, vinegar):

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Black-eyed peafits about as well
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Sesamefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, pepper, mustard, cider, vinegar. 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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