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Stewed Beans

A green bean stew with parsley, chives, mushrooms, butter, wine or cream, water, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,150 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stew

  1. Combine parsley, chives or onions, and mushrooms in a stew pan.

  2. Add butter rolled in flour, white wine (or cream), and water, and stir well.

  3. Add the soaked and cut green beans, filling the pan.

  4. Stew gently over low heat until the beans are tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, stir in the egg yolks.

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 + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mushroom + white winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  3. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Chive + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Green beans
Form the body of the dish, becoming tender as they stew gently.
Butter
Adds richness, and flour coating helps thicken the cooking liquid into a sauce.
White wine or cream
Supplies liquid and acidity or richness, shaping the flavor of the sauce.
Egg yolks
Stirred in at the end, they enrich and thicken the sauce, adding body.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but if the sauce is too hot or boils after they go in, they can scramble and curdle. Adding them just before serving, off strong heat, keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the green beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, chive, mushroom, butter, flour, white wine, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Green beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, chive, mushroom, butter, flour, white wine, egg. 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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