Name: String Bean, Green
Ingredients: 2 teaspoons salt; 1 quart water; 2 tablespoons butter; ½ teaspoon salt; ⅛ teaspoon white pepper

Why it works: Butter and white pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,814 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

String Bean, Green

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

Bring 1 quart of water to a boil in a pot and add 2 teaspoons of salt.
Add the string beans and cook until tender.

Season and serve

Mix 2 tablespoons of butter, ½ teaspoon of salt, and ⅛ teaspoon of white pepper.
Toss the cooked string beans with the butter mixture before serving.

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.

Butter + white peppertop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,814 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

String beans (in the method): The main vegetable, which cooks until tender in salted boiling water.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, coating the cooked beans with flavour and moisture.

“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.